All Hallows' Eve
by Whiggity
Summary: Helene Van Dort is not often allowed out at night, but the evening of her sixteenth birthday will be an exception. How very pagan, to visit one's parents' graves on Hallowe'en! A threequel.
1. An Affinity for Toads

**Before you start, be aware this story is a continuation of two others - "The Wine of Ages" and "In Between," both recently updated and shiny new. If you haven't read 'em, this won't make sense, so get on it!**

1

Helene Winnifred Chastity Philomena Van Dort was by all accounts a morbid child, a fact most often attributed among the townsfolk to her ill-fated parentage and the unfortunate circumstances surrounding her birth. Born on All Hallows' Eve to a fishmonger's son and the Everglot family's only daughter, both of her parents were said to have been found dead in their beds come the morning of All Saints' Day, passed from this world by means that no one was quite sure of. Relegated ever since to a life with the fishmongers rather than the nobility, the poor girl, from earliest childhood, had always shown an open tendency toward asocial and unchristian behavior. She disliked wearing gloves to church, and well into her fifteenth year could be found with toads in her apron pockets. She seemed to have an affinity for the creatures.

Far be it from anyone in the town to insinuate that the granddaughter of Lord Everglot was a witch. But it was a common enough, if ostensibly playful, sentiment to hear behind peoples' hands, that such a strange girl certainly had "a bit of the devil in 'er."

Helene did not care much for the mutterings of others. In truth, she didn't care much, for much at all. The Van Dorts had done everything in their power to turn her into a proper lady, but their power was frankly limited. Their previous experience in raising a quiet son had made them feel well-prepared for raising their quiet granddaughter, but unlike her father, Helene had a mean and subversive streak beneath her shy exterior. She was never one to be outright confrontational, but more than once, dead mice had been found in the shoes of children with whom she'd had past disagreements.

In light of her grandparents' general impassiveness and their failure to teach her proper etiquette, wardship of the girl was informally passed to the housekeeper. Mrs. Agnes Hall was strict but kind, a fair cook and a brilliant haggler, and had a temper that may have tended to rub off on her charge. Agnes had no great fondness for men or boys, and the more Helene listened, she found that she had to agree with that sentiment. Even Helene's own father, Mister Van Dort himself, was not exempt from scrutiny. "Your father always seemed a kind man," Mrs. Hall had said once, when Helene asked, "but you do know, he disappeared days before your birth when Missus Van Dort's consumption was at its worst. Disappeared until you'd been born, and showed up again when you were just an hour in this world. Brought back by guilt, I'm sure," she added, and her knuckles whitened on the edge of the washbasin where the laundry was whitening. The story had always perturbed Helene. It did not mesh at all with the image of the slight, thoughtful-looking man she held in her mind.

In the cool summertime, Helene spent most of her days outdoors, in the scrub garden behind her grandparents' townhouse. Occasionally green things could be coaxed into blooming from the cold soil, but most years the garden remained as gray and brittle as the sky. In the winter and spring she was inclined to stay in town for lessons, but in fall, the season of her birth, she was always happiest. Her grandmother insisted that she not be outdoors after dark, but from the crack of each autumn dawn until the dark of the evening, she spent most of her time in the pine forest at the edge of town. Even Mrs. Hall didn't know what the girl spent her time doing in there, and Helene generally did not tell, but it was no great secret: she was visiting the graveyard.

The Van Dorts had taken their granddaughter to visit her parents' graves many times in her childhood. They were situated at the edge of the main cemetery, under a weeping pine that scattered its needles across their names every year. But in the time since then, Helene had discovered much more to the cemetery than first met the eye – unconsecrated graves a hundred years old or more dotted the area beyond the wrought fence, and when one ventured further into the woods, there were cairns and standing stones to be found between the trees. It was highly mysterious.

Helene could be a frank and humorless girl, and might have spent her week-ends tromping like a wild child through the woods, but she was not a barbarian; she knew to wear her petticoats into town and to tie up her hair for company. On the eve of her sixteenth birthday, with a half-moon half-hidden in the sky, she was dressed in her finest and served a tinny, distant dinner in the enormous hall at Everglot Manor, as her maternal grandparents shot looks of deepest loathing at one another under the onslaught of the Van Dorts' jabbering about fish. She was gifted an ivory comb and a golliwog with hair made of dyed cotton batting. That night she took down her hair to comb it, and sat by the window to look over the town rooftops and think about herself.

The conditions of her birth normally held little weight for her. She had never known her parents and did not feel lost for them. _But sixteen years ago tomorrow,_ she thought, _my father and mother died. _Wasn't that strange? She closed her eyes and tried to feel dead. It felt very much like becoming tired at the end of the day.

She had never gone out after dark before, but in a moment then she decided that she would. It seemed a very pagan thing, to visit a cemetery on All Hallows' Eve night, but tomorrow, she resolved, she would see her parents' graves after the sun was gone, as it had been when they'd died. It was the right thing for her to do. She climbed down from the windowsill and threw her brown hair over her shoulder, now clean as ivory could make it. She tried to hold the golliwog as she lay in bed that night, but his hair tickled her nose, and it seemed a very childish gift anyway, so she pushed him to the other side of the bed. He ended up on the floor before she fell asleep.

She dreamed vaguely of brushing a thousand pine needles from her parents' graves that night, but otherwise slept without incident. When she rose in the morning, it was with firm determination and a plan in mind. The sun was invisible behind clouds and the sky was a cracked gray. Rain fell lightly, and all the world smelled of rotting leaves. It was a perfect autumn day.

* * *

><p>Somewhere beneath and slightly off to the side of that little town in the mountains, the Land of the Dead was bright with lanternlight in the face of unending night. Over the market and square could be heard a great ruckus from the tavern on the corner; the sounds of brawlers and drinkers mixed with the chiming of a cheerful piano and a synchronized clap.<p>

The world here was colorful even in the darkness. The square was bustling with corpses and skeletons in various states of decay, but their permanent grins seemed only indicative of their good spirits. The wine was good, the streets were warm, and Hallowe'en was near.

Only one figure seemed not to be participating in the festivities. He was bent and haggard-looking, with a mean glint in his eye. Most of the criminals in the Land of the Dead had long since given up their bile and frustration in deference to the realization that once one is dead, there is little to fight over. Lord Barkis Bittern was not most criminals.

He was a corpse with a grudge, a tentative plan, and nearly two decades of brooding behind him. He was as dangerous and angry to this day as he had been for seventeen years.

But it was almost Hallowe'en, and things were going to change.

He did not move for the rest of the night. He kept his eye on the market square and sat in absolute silence.


	2. Brass Box

2

Within an hour of waking, Helene knew that her sixteenth birthday was not going to be a festive one. Rain fell ever harder as the day wore on, and the darkest corners and hallways of the townhouse were bathed in deep blue shadow. Her grandmother and grandfather were out the door on the way to a baron's luncheon before noon came, and while Mrs. Hall labored with cake-baking in the kitchen, Helene found herself curled atop the white wooden desk under her bedroom window, searching the clouds for a light spot from behind which the sun might shine.

A stocky brown cat that she sometimes fed in the garden trotted its way down the street below her. She tapped on the window in order to catch its attention, but it didn't hear, and eventually she slid from the desk back onto the cool wooden floor. Her skirts dragged at her bare ankles, but she rushed out the door and down the stairs nonetheless, without regard for the risk of tripping and, as she was often warned, snapping her neck like a chicken's.

"May I help?" she asked as she popped her head into the warm kitchen. It was the only properly-lit room in the house, with wide windows and a bright hearth. The sheen of sweat on Agnes Hall's brow was clearly visible, but she waved a floury hand at the girl and told her to shoo.

"It's your birthday, child," she said as she pulled a wooden spoon from a light batter. "One doesn't let a girl prepare her own birthday cake. What sort of caretaker would I be?"

"One who doesn't let a girl die of _boredom_ on her birthday, either," Helene said, stepping tautly into the kitchen. "I've got nothing else to do."

"You may wipe out the washbasin in the cellar if you're bored," Mrs. Hall said.

"On my birthday!"

The older woman threw up her powdered hands. "Impossible! Do what you want. Pull the soda out of the pantry for me, and tie up your hair."

Helene tied her long hair back with a ribbon from the sugar sack and pulled the tub of soda from its place on the floury pantry shelf. She rejoined Mrs. Hall in the kitchen and turned to the recipe book on the countertop. Milk was the third ingredient, so she trudged to the icebox. Mrs. Hall gazed at her approvingly as she wiped melted ice from the cold, wet bottle.

"It is good to see a Van Dort who knows how to bake," she said, holding a hand out to receive the milk. "I could swear that your mother had never stepped foot inside a kitchen before she had a home of her own."

"I'm not my mother," Helene said with curious inflection as she dried her hands.

"And no one would ever mistake your personality for hers, child," Mrs. Hall said. "I cannot see Victoria bringing frogs to bed even once. Bring me the circular pan and the lard. You do resemble her extraordinarily, however."

Helene was bending to retrieve the cake pan when she heard this. She glanced at the floor and thought briefly of the portrait of her mother hanging in the hall. When she brought the pan to Mrs. Hall, the older woman took it, and Helene stood at her side for a moment before asking, "You think I look like her?"

Mrs. Hall didn't look up from smearing lard about the inside of the tin. "Certainly you do. Well -" Her eyes flitted to the girl's face for a moment. "You have the same jaw. And nose."

Helene quietly agreed with Mrs. Hall's assessment of her inherited features. "And my eyes?" she asked, trying to sound uninterested. Victoria had had extraordinarily pretty eyes.

Mrs. Hall looked up again and straightened her back entirely. She looked at Helene for a moment without speaking, but when she did, it was with a strange affectation.

"No," she said, and she seemed able to hold the girl's gaze for only a moment longer before she looked away. "You have your father's eyes."

"Oh." Helene looked at the back of Mrs. Hall's gray head as the older woman returned to the batter. It wasn't _so_ great a disappointment, she decided as she scooped a teaspoon of soda from the can.

At least she knew now that she had a pretty nose.

* * *

><p>The cake was cooled and frosted in pink by the time that Grandmother and Grandfather Van Dort arrived back home at the end of the afternoon. As her birthday banquet had been held the previous night, there was nothing terribly special to do on this evening, but Mrs. Hall served roasted chicken and honeyed biscuits for supper, and Helene asked that she sit with the family to eat at the table.<p>

Whilst Nell Van Dort nattered extensively about the Baroness's brooches and jewels and her exquisite tea dress, and as her husband picked blithely at his chicken, Mrs. Hall passed the girl a small box and nodded to her to open it under the table. Helene scooted her chair outward and placed the box in her lap as she opened it to reveal a small brass rectangle nestled in a bed of cotton. The girl shot the housekeeper a quizzical look and the older woman smiled as she took back the box to tuck into her apron pocket.

After the cake had been served and the dishes piled in the kitchen, the Van Dorts retired to the warmth of the lounge and Helene met Mrs. Hall in the kitchen again. "What is it?" she asked as the housekeeper pulled the brass object back out from its box.

"You'll enjoy this." She held it in one hand and flipped the brass open on a hinge to reveal a strange metal casing on the inside of its bottom half, with a wick and a wheel. She clicked the wheel quickly with her thumb, twice, and on the second time the wick sparked into flame. Helene started.

"A lamp-lighter," Mrs. Hall said, handing it to the girl. When she let go of the wheel's base, the flame died. Helene tried her own hand at it and had to attempt it four or so times, but eventually she too was able to spring flame from the box. "The merchant told me that it acts as a tiny flint and steel, with fuel inside."

"It's so small," Helene said. She hugged Mrs. Hall gently with a little smile. "Thank you."

"Mmm," said the older woman. "Well, I figure that a girl your age could stand a gift with a bit more utility than a golly doll. Don't you tell your grandmother about this. If she would manage set the house alight with it, she'll assume anyone could."

Helene retired to bed not long afterward, hiding the lighter in her sleeve as she kissed her grandparents goodnight, and then sitting up in her bedclothes for a long time, flicking the flame on and off, waiting patiently for the household to retire to sleep. At nearly eleven o' clock, the clouds had lifted and a crescent moon was out, and Helene was listening to Mrs. Hall make her last movements of the night before going to bed herself. The girl's stomach was all in a whorl and her hands were shaking slightly, though that may have had something to do with her insistence on keeping the window open in late October.

Finally, _finally,_ the last light flickered off, and Helene stopped striking the lighter. She sat in the darkness and silence for as long as she could bear, and then lifted the covers gently from her body and stepped barefoot onto the cold floor. The wind stirred her light nightdress and she wrapped herself in her arms.

It wouldn't be a long trip outdoors, she had promised herself that, but if she were caught, she ought not to be in her skivvies. Doing everything she could to avoid squeaking the wooden drawers, she pulled a loose skirt and a frock coat from the bureau and dressed silently. She wore knee-length socks and low-ankled shoes, and must have looked a fashion fright, but if all went as planned, no one would see her anyway. With her new lighter in her coat pocket, she peeked warily out the door. There was no movement, and the sound of her grandmother's snoring seemed to easily cover the noise of her walking down the hall. She stepped gingerly along the edges of the stairs and the entrance hall, and when she reached the door, it was with a sense of great achievement. Mrs. Hall was a light sleeper, and still she had made it out of the room without detection.

Now she was almost free. She pulled the door open with as much delicacy as she could manage, and in a miracle, the hinges did not creak – they turned as silently as ghosts, as though they were in on the secret with her. She stepped across the threshold, and when she turned around, the slim moon was so brilliant that she had to shield her eyes. Moonlight reflected off of all the town's wet surfaces, and while there was no one on the street, the whole world seemed filled with the sound of dripping water.

She took one step forward and no one accosted her. Her heart was beating like a wild man's drum. One more step, and another followed. She walked slowly, but there was no need. She was utterly alone.

In such empty space, she suddenly remembered her composure. She felt rather beautiful, striding through the moonlight with her hair flowing free in the breeze, like a sorceress. She lifted her chin as she walked toward the darkness of the woods, and felt a smile touch her face.

Within moments, Helene was entirely gone to the forest's reaching shadows, and it was without even the slightest glance backward.


	3. Into the Woods

3

She wasn't but a few hundred yards beneath the forest's weeping canopy when she started thinking about dead people.

The story was an old one, of course. As the greengrocer's son told whenever the young children of the town crowded his father's confectionary counter, the dead had come back to roam the town once a decade or so past, rotting and shambling all. When his years-gone grandfather visited him from the grave, he asserted, he'd told him of a secret stash of gold and diamonds hidden beneath the floorboards of the shop. Helene had thought to ask him once why, then, he still worked at a grocery, but instead had turned her skepticism into just the right amount of indignation necessary to justify sneaking another wafer from the jar. She'd never believed a word of it.

The warmth of a grocery felt very far from her now, though.

From far away, an unseen owl asked her name. Tendrils of mist caressed the rough tree trunks alongside the path. The trails that she knew so well in the daytime were nearly alien to her now, crisscrossed with shadows and filled with deep wells into which she might fall and snap her ankles off if she wasn't careful. Helene could feel her heart beating in her hands. Certainly, if the dead were going to show up anywhere at all, it would be here, and it would be now. The penny dreadfuls all said so.

Lightly, a leaf crunched by her ankle and she felt a brief whisk against her leg. The beginnings of a scream were forming in her throat as she clapped a hand over her mouth and stumbled backward against a tree. In the instant before she had properly identified the stout brown cat standing on the trail where her foot used to be, she had already imagined a goblin in its place, hunched and snarling – but the illusion was shattered at the moment that the ghoul started to meow at her. The cat licked itself as she held her sides at the edge of the path, dipping her head and reeling in the sudden recession of her panic.

"Cat!" she hissed as she pushed herself away from the tree and stepped back onto the road, unsteady-footed. "Do _not_ follow people in the dead of night. Go home."

"Mewr," said the cat.

"You'll do what you want anyway." Helene glanced over her shoulder in the direction of the town. The trees were thick, but the east of the woods was lit with an ambient light to indicate the path back to civilization. "Fine, you can come. As if I have a lot of say in the matter." She marched off haughtily with her chin in the air, but promptly stepped in a puddled hole. Mud squelched around her shoe and her skirt hem was splashed dirty brown. She made sure to watch the pathway after that.

It was less than a mile to reach the cemetery, but a trained eye could see that the monuments to the dead began much sooner than that. A smooth stone here, a crumbling cairn there – Helene had never asked Pastor Galswells why so many were buried outside the cemetery gates, but she guessed it probably had something to do with sin, which was a common theme in both the pastor's sermons and in his informal, day-to-day admonitions. At the side of one mossy stone, which bore all the marks of chiseled inscription from long ago, Helene paused. She laid her hand atop it and whispered softly, "Mister Toad?"

There was no response from the rock. She peeked around the backside to where a hollow was set deep in the granite. "Mister Toad," she said again plaintively, and this time there came a croak. A large ugly head with flat golden eyes popped out into the moonlight at the stone's surface. "There you are. Sorry for not visiting," Helene said conversationally as she scooped the fat toad up in her palm and deposited him on her shoulder, beginning to wander down the forest path again. "You've seen how poor the weather's been. I've never been here at night before, I know. This is a special occasion."

The toad said, "Rrrrbt."

Looming ahead on the path striped in shadow, Helene could see the cemetery gates and hear them creaking ever so slightly, which was strange, because the night was quite still. Her heart jumped into her throat again at the thought of passing through the entrance. Nothing at all was going to go wrong, but it was a frightening and exciting and awful idea all the same. She held her breath as she stepped through the gates – so derelict was the area that she wasn't sure a curator even existed to lock them at night – and for just a moment, she paused with her breath caught in a tight ball and her limbs stiff. The gate creaked again and nearly coaxed a start from her, but her eyes swept the area thoroughly and she could see no ghosts, no ghouls, and no demons in the dark.

"Rrrbt," said Mister Toad.

"Brrwr," said the cat.

"Hush," said Helene, and she smoothed her skirt, straightened her coat and took her second brave step into the cradle of the dead. She knew from long experience the exact position of the Van Dorts' graves, though she could hardly see in the gloom. Moonlight was thin here beneath the trees, but her parent's gravestones were in the same spot as ever – two flat slabs of granite pressed into the ground, though difficult to find at first because they were nearly completely covered by brown and green pine needles. As Helene approached the twin graves, she felt a rising apprehension in her stomach and had a wild vision of corpses beginning to claw up from the dirt – but still the world remained silent. She stayed in front of the two pine-swept markers, reaching up to rub Mister Toad's sticky head with her breath loud in her ears. The scent of dirt was thick on the air, and in the new silence of her inactivity she realized that the sound of dripping water was still persistent in the background of the woods – heavy and strong and sugar-sweet.

The graves sat like dark masses within the earth, and not for the first time, Helene found their presence humbling. It was a hard thing to think about, death, and though she'd never shed a tear for the two parents she'd never known, somehow seeing the carved date of their deaths gave her a new respect for them as people. They'd fallen into the dark laying side-by-side, sixteen years ago this night. They'd faced a void that she could hardly comprehend.

She was contemplating cleaning the rubble from atop the stones when a branch clicked lightly perhaps five feet behind her. Helene absently said, "Hush, Cat," at almost the exact same moment that the cat sprang to atop the gravestone before her eyes, his tail stiff and his ears folded flat against his head.

_"Hsss,"_ said the cat, and the branch snapped again.

Helene had never moved so quickly in her life, whirling around so that Mister Toad flew from her shoulder with a croak and landed in a pile of leaves. She froze as her eyes scanned the field of graves. All she could see was the far corner of the cemetery, as deeply bathed in shadows as the entrance of a cave. She blinked twice and felt her heart restart loudly in her ears.

One, two, three seconds. There was nothing to see before her but the graveyard's darkest corner, and no movement in the trees.

"Hello?" she whispered.

"Hello, my dear," said a voice at her right shoulder.

Helene was not prone to extreme displays of emotion, but it was the second time that night that she had barely managed to stifle a scream, and her throat was rough with fear. She stumbled backward with a shriek as a hand reached out of the shadows to steady her shoulder, almost gently. She could see a shape manifesting from beneath the treeshadows before her, tall and broad.

"Dear Victoria," drawled a man's deep voice as a black hand wrapped around her upper arm and turned her about to face the form at the edge of her vision. "It has been _so dreadfully _long."

_Victoria?_

Surely she was dreaming. "I – I'm not -" she began.

The apparition before her was so unreal that it killed the words on her lips. It was a man that stood before her, that much she was sure of, but his dark shape seemed a twisted mockery of the human form, warped and scarred. She couldn't see straight enough to be sure, but the hand gripping her shoulder looked thin and white as bone.

"Why, you don't remember your own dear husband?" he asked her, his grip tightening painfully on her arm. "Has it been sixteen years now, sweet thing, or seventeen? Easy to lose track of the time down there. You haven't changed a _bit."_ She saw the twist of a smile in his lips, limned by the thin moonlight.

Helene felt lightheaded to the point that she thought she might faint, and she lacked both the ambition and the ability to speak. _Mister Toad,_ she thought wildly, _Mister Toad, is he alright?_ As her eyes scanned the ground around her feet, she caught the glint of cold steel held in the man's right hand. He had a knife, she realized, and instinctively she convulsed and screamed again, tearing desperately away from him. The sleeve of her jacket nearly tore at the seams, but his grip remained steadfast.

"Oh, don't worry yourself, my dear," the man said, voice still smooth as he drew her closer, where she caught a whiff of him. The heavy, cloying scent of dirt ensconced his form. "I'm not going to hurt you yet. We still have so much catching up to do. I simply thought you might need some encouragement to come." She still couldn't see his face. "I knew you would come eventually. I knew you wouldn't be able to resist visiting your _precious – Victor's – grave,"_ and with those words his voice suddenly grew harder and more hateful, yanking on her shoulder to draw her closer each time. Though the words were spat at her, there was no moisture from his breath. The air around him was bone-dry.

All Helene could think to herself was, _I never told Mrs. Hall where I went._

_"Please, my love," said the man to her, his voice drawn low and dangerous. The knife in his hand pointed, glinting, toward the darkest corner of the graveyard. His arm was draped in the fine wool sleeve of a dinner jacket, but the material was eaten and torn. "Join me."_

With an angry scream, the fat brown cat launched itself from a tombstone at the man's back. As it clawed its way up his jacket and sunk its teeth into the top of his head, he gave a snarl and stumbled backward, jerking Helene with him once before letting go. She fell to her knees in a patch of dull moonlight, and as she raised her eyes, saw that the places where the cat clawed at his flesh were pulling away easily from the bone, nearly sloughing off.

In his fury, the man whirled about to face her, and for the first time she saw his face – half a grinning skull and half as blue as water. While the cat screamed and tore at his back, his eyes met hers and suddenly he grew still. With seemingly little effort, he simply reached backward and snagged the cat at the nape of the neck with one bone-thin arm. Without even a glance he flung it far away across the graveyard. "No!" screamed Helene. There was a soft _smack_ as the stout brown cat collided with a tree trunk and fell to the ground. It stopped screaming.

The man took a step forward.

In the course of thirty seconds, of a minute at _most,_ Helene's entire world had come to an end. She had never regretted anything so much as leaving the house that night. Her heart was broken and her arms were bruised and there was fire in her veins. She stumbled to her feet, and tripped on her skirt, and ran. For the briefest of seconds, she felt a hard tug at the end of her long hair, but it was unsteady and she pulled sharply away. The darkness at the edge of the graveyard looked deep before her, and she knew that she ought to turn for the gates, but there was no time, no chance to escape any other way. She knew these woods better than anybody. She would survive this night, if only so that she might go on to never think of it ever, ever again.

In the shadows at the edge of the cemetery, she took a step and felt quite suddenly as though she were enduring a massive fall. A rough, infuriated scream cut the air behind her, but it was faint, and fainter now, and then quite suddenly there was nothing to hear at all. There was no moonlight left in this dark hole, and maybe not any Helene either. She fell through the warm black with her eyes neither open nor closed.

It might have been a minute or a year that had passed before she found herself cushioned again in the darkness by something soft and sweet as loam.


	4. A Dry Place

4

Even before she opened her eyes, Helene knew that something about this place seemed familiar. Her first breath stirred a memory in her mind of something musty and organic and strangely maternal, like wet cobblestones drying in the sun, or a nursery in disuse, but as quickly as she became sure of it, the feeling vanished again. She was just left with moss pressing against her nose and sticks jamming themselves into her knees and her palms.

When her eyelids did flutter open, it caused no immediately discernible change in her ability to see; the air around was quite black, with some bare light falling from a dark sky above, but not enough to walk by. Her heartbeat was thunderously loud in her ears, and as she sat up she found herself quite lightheaded. She knelt unsteadily and held her forehead in her hands with a feeling of deep despair. What on earth had happened?

A light crack of leaves at her side made her jump; she couldn't see the perpetrator in the darkness and for a minute almost tried to scramble to her feet and run, but a second later she felt a tug at her skirts and a soft brush against her hand. She blinked in the darkness with a feeling of rising apprehension in her throat, which was suddenly released as the little shape at her side gave a curious, "Mrrwr?"

"Cat!" she breathed, reaching out a hand and finding his tail whipping around her wrist as he tried to rub against her. She found his chin and began scratching vigorously. "Oh, thank goodness! I'm so glad you're alright, I -" She paused as her hand traveled toward his ear and she found her fingers running across cold, sticky fur at the base of his skull. "Oh, no…"

A small whiff was all it took to confirm that it was blood. "Oh, Cat," she whispered to him, finding his sides and lifting the stout tom into her lap. "I'm so sorry. I should never have let you come." The cat purred into her ear; despite the blood loss, he was acting quite healthy. "I'll never let Mrs. Hall chase you away from the kitchen window again. And I'll bring you a can of fish every night," she promised. "I don't know what's happened tonight and I don't want to know, but let's go home."

The cat said, "Brrrm."

Helene's eyes were finally beginning to adjust to the darkness. It was becoming more and more clear that she had not left the woods, with tall, gaunt trees still surrounding her on all sides, but something about the area seemed wrong, and she certainly was no longer in the graveyard. She stood slowly, brushing dry leaves and needles from her hands and skirt, and tried to look about. Though she dreaded staying in the woods any longer than necessary, perhaps she would have to wait for sunrise to make her way back home. She knew that the town lay to the east, but which direction that was she couldn't determine in the darkness, and the moon was quite gone. The cat next to her made a small noise.

_…Wait a minute._ The moon was gone?

Helene turned her eyes upward, her view unimpeded by a thousand bare tree branches reaching toward one another across the canopy. There was no moon in the sky where it had, just minutes ago, shone bright as day, and neither were there any stars dotting the black above. The atmosphere seemed tinged with a strange green glow, but that must have been a trick of her vision in the dark. She shook her head. The cat mrowled at her again from the area around her ankles, rubbing a sticky ear against her skirt. She didn't bother to admonish him. Blood on her clothing was certainly the least of her problems now.

For all her fears of being left exposed in the woods until morning, the forest did seem extraordinarily quiet. No bird nor bat nor cricket nor wolf was chickering at her through the darkness; no breeze stirred the leaves, and the air smelled like a mausoleum. When a tinder-dry branch cracked beneath her heel, she realized with a sinking feeling what it was that had seemed so wrong when she first scanned the clearing – the forest of a few minutes past had been wet with autumn rain. "Where on earth am I?" she asked aloud, struggling to maintain composure for an audience she knew she didn't have.

_"Merrow,"_ the cat said, catching a claw in her skirt. She reached down to shoo him, but he swiped at her as well and turned in a small circle, his pupils wide in the darkness and his ears flat against his head. _"Mrrrrw."_

She turned her head as a small noise reached her ears – a crashing and cursing sound from between the trees a few dozen yards away. She froze with a feeling like ice water dribbling down into her stomach. "Is it him?" she breathed to the cat. He hissed.

Helene stepped backward and snapped another branch heavily beneath her foot; she didn't know whether the man had heard, but her nerve quite abandoned her then and she bolted away to stumble behind the nearest tree, shaking like a leaf. She pushed her back against the trunk and took a deep breath, pressing a hand to her mouth to stifle the sound. The footsteps were drawing closer, a heavy, limping, dragging noise rattling the debris on the ground.

"…girl… of course… slippery as an eel on the platter…"

Helene was simultaneously too frightened to move and too curious not to. Naturally, it was the far more dangerous of the two impulses that won her over. She inched her nose around the trunk and peered with one eye toward the dark clearing in which she'd awoken. At its edge, she could see a large, shadowy form moving jerkily between the trees, one leg appearing to drag through the dead leaves, hardly able to support its weight. She couldn't see the man's face, but she could imagine again what she had seen for just a brief second before: a horrible grinning half-skull and skin as blue as water. He wasn't a man, certainly, but a demon or a ghoul – and the thought made her snap her head back around the tree with a shock of fright. Of course. The dead weren't the only ones out and about on All Hallow's Eve.

And all the while that she thought about this, his voice was drawing closer. "Pretty little thing," she could hear him say. "You're not going to escape from me this time. I know you're near." Helene's heart rate shot upward and her hands trembled, but she forced herself to stay still, lifting her chin to the sky so that her breathing was not so loud. "Do you remember your dress?" she heard him whisper loudly to the woods at large. His voice was smooth and strong, but somehow she was sure that she could hear a deep stress pressing at it from behind. "That _beautiful_ dress you wore at the altar when we were wed? Oh yes, my dear, don't think I've forgotten."

The cat was growling at Helene's feet, and she jerked a foot to make him quiet. A leaf crunched beneath her shifting weight. Suddenly, she was quite certain that the man in the clearing had frozen, and she did the same. His speaking stopped. As still and quiet as she could make herself, the sound of her own breath still seemed thunderous in her ears. Momentarily, the world seemed so still that time itself might have stopped.

And then, from the opposite side of the tree against which Helene leaned, she heard in a deep whisper: "There's the problem with being alive, sweet. You're always so _noisy."_

The thrill of absolute horror that gripped her head and heart had no comparison. She leapt forward and landed painfully on the side of her foot, but even as she twisted to see the man's large shape reveal itself from the other side of the trunk, she was already blindly fleeing in whatever direction she thought would bring her furthest away from the spot. Leaves flew and swirled through the air in her wake, shattering in the air like sand. The pitch black revealed nothing to her at more than five feet's distance; once, twice, three times she nearly ran straight into the trunk of a tree in the swimming gloom, but each time she stumbled away to the side before impact and started in a new direction, the worst damages to befall her being the painful pressures of running on her hurt foot and the grabbing, tearing twigs of a thousand low branches.

Helene wasn't sure how long she'd run through the tilting darkness with tears on her lips and her heart in her ears, but her throat was starting to feel rough, as if it had been drug through by long fingernails, and her gait was slowing, no matter how hard she pressed on into the night. Eventually, she misjudged her step and stumbled, skirt catching on a creeping limb as she fell. She didn't care anymore. She came to a rest on her knees and leaned over to press her forehead against the bone-dry ground. The cat was nowhere to be seen. Unusually, her mind was quite empty, wiped clean by fear and exhaustion. The only thought she seemed to be able to hold onto was the idea of simply curling in the leaves and falling asleep, safety and warmth be damned. She would wake in the morning with the sun spilling through the window and the smell of breakfast in the kitchen.

But then a thought manifested itself from the creeping fog of her mind, and with it came a deep throb of swollen pain in her foot to remind her: No dream was as detailed as this. No nightmare hurt so badly. So she stood, shaking, beneath a vaulted ceiling of naked trees and gazed up at the sky. The cold black above her still seemed mixed with whorls of green and a sheen of light on the horizon.

Light.

She turned, in what direction she couldn't have said, and saw that the air beyond the next hillock seemed lit by a warm glow. Suddenly, her foot didn't hurt so badly. She crawled and then limped forward, pressing her palms against tree trunks and exposed roots on the embankment to pull her way up the hill's steep incline. The town, or some town, was close, so close that she could almost smell it. Helene Van Dort was going to survive this night, just as she'd promised herself. When she went home, she might never leave the house again.

But even as she crested the hill, half on her elbows and knees and with her palms raw from the scratch of bark, she knew that something was wrong. As she'd expected, there was a town at the base of the hill before her, but a much larger one than she'd thought. It sprawled in all directions, a mass of towering, spiraling structures in wood, stone, and bright chipped paint – overall rather more impoverished-looking than what she was accustomed to, but that wasn't the problem. Though every gas lamp on the street was lit with a cheerful greenish flame to push back the dead of night, the narrow, winding streets were quite deserted. Not a single man, woman, or child could be seen on the roads closest to her, and there wasn't a sound to be heard echoing across the buildings. It was as silent as the grave.

Helene descended the hill slowly, aware of every noise she made in the shifting scrub. The closest building to the base of the hill seemed hardly more than an outhouse, crumbling with age on a base of stone, but larger buildings shot up nearly immediately behind it, imposing in their size, spindly as the teeth in a cave. The first gas lamp she passed sputtered slightly in her presence, but kept burning merrily to show her way down the street of rough cobbled stones. The roads didn't seem made for horses or wagons. With their tight turns and thin passes, at places only a few feet wide, they didn't seem made for anyone at all.

The buildings, growing ever closer and larger as she walked, overshadowed the streets, dominating even the light of the few helpful lamps along the road. Once she approached a storefront on her left, boarded and dark; across the road and leaned against a wall in a manner which indicated they'd been there for quite a long time were several open, empty coffins. Helene felt an uneasy creep fall down her spine and into her stomach. It was a struggle to remember that even as a young lady alone on the street, she was safer here than in the woods.

It might have been a full half-mile she traveled along the winding streets before they seemed to open before her, and in the market area into which she stepped she saw for the first time signs of human habitation. In the center of the square laid scattered tables, tankards, painted leaves and the odd smashed pumpkin. A large banner was ripped and spread along the ground at the feet of a ghastly skeletal, sculpted horse; as Helene approached, she kicked an edge of the hanging outward to read the latter portion of the salutation.

_MERRY HALLOWE'EN!_

Pastor Galswells said that nobody who held a proper fear of God celebrated Hallowe'en.

Helene lifted her head again and stepped backward toward the base of the skeleton horse. The sky above was black and the buildings around were lit a friendly lime color; many slumped inward or forward or backward, all ceding to gravity in their own ways. A pub sat on the corner with its door open but its entrance dark. But for the pumpkins on the ground and the occasional spill of ale pooling between the cobblestones, there was no evidence that anyone had seen the town for months. She might be alone. She might be completely alone in a town with no way home, waiting for a man with half a face to drag her screaming into the night.

And in the corner of her eye, she thought she saw the horse's skull _move._

With a faint strain of music beginning to reach out to her, she leapt away from the sculpture and turned. Of course the horse hadn't _actually_ moved; it was stone, or perhaps bone, now that she looked closer, and not alive either way. Even the possibility of movement, though, was enough to turn her mind back to a horrorshow of monsters and mistakes. She was so full of worry that she almost didn't notice the drifting sound of a piano pressing its hands over her ears, and when she did, it was with an initial sense of disbelief. Music is one of the easier things to fool oneself into experiencing, but no; these ivory songs were real, and moreover, they were coming from the dark entrance of the pub, which gaped like a mouth in the great wall of the buildings before her.

Helene would have liked to hesitate and worry her options before entering, but instead she stepped forward and approached the pub door with her back straight and her chin held high. The entrance was strangely tunnel-like; a shock of soft light could be seen around a curving corner, but nothing more.

From within, the piano's music stopped.

As she took two steps onward she heard, for the first time since setting foot on the streets, someone speaking. "…go," said a raspy voice. "Geddem out, let 'em enjoy themselves. It's Hallowe'en."

From a second voice, further away, she heard, "Would be nice to have someplace to go."

She turned the corner into the pub proper, a large, dark area lit only by a single dim spotlight that focused on a piano perhaps fifteen feet away, on a dais against the wall. The shape of a man was bent over the instrument on the stage, half-sitting on the bench and half crouched to gather musical notes from their stand – a young man, in trousers and a white dress shirt with rolled sleeves. Helene felt suddenly like she'd been punched in the stomach. Tall and thin and dark of hair and facing mostly away from her, he was lit poorly by the shining light focused above him, but even in quarter-view of his face she knew who he was. She'd been looking on his painting her entire life, after all, and in the twenty years since its creation he hadn't changed a bit.

His hair was black and his eyes were brown and when he turned, his face was long and looked nothing like hers.

And his skin was blue.

"Father?" she whispered to herself.

"New arrival?" she heard in a low gruff voice from over her shoulder. When she turned, it was to see that a talking skeleton in a bowler hat was gazing down at her. When he tilted his head, his single eye rolled from one socket to the next.

"Ah. Helluva day to die," he said conversationally as Helene's vision suddenly become quite focused and flat. "An' young." She couldn't feel her feet, and her arms were limp as empty coatsleeves. With a whimper, she dropped heavily to her knees and immediately felt the black of the pub pushing at her temples. It was all too much for one day. She was simply out of screams to give.

"Don' worry about it, we'll set you up a nice welcome," the skeleton continued as she pressed her closed eyes into the palms of her hands, her hearing beginning to fail as his voice grew further away. "Scare up some friends, pull out the keg. Plenty o' reason to celebrate tonight."

_I have gone mad._

His voice was almost kind. "Welcome home."


	5. New Arrival

**OMG I'm back. So fab. The previous chapters posted here have been quickly revised and some small details updated, but that's all that's needed to be done – let's go!**

5

It was always best to let Bonejangles handle the new arrivals.

Of course, it was strange just to _have_ a new arrival at such a late hour on Hallowe'en, but Victor Van Dort was quietly glad for the distraction. It had been a dreary evening after the cessation of all the day's festivities, and with midnight fast approaching and nowhere in particular to go, he had opted to stay at the pub sweeping and wiping and doing whatever else might keep him occupied for the long dark night ahead. They talked together, of course, himself and Paul and Bonejangles and some of the older ladies who had come in an hour or so earlier with new arrangements of funeral flowers in their hats, but most conversation was rather muted, as it was wont to be around this time of year. There was something in the air that made a corpse want to be alone.

"Helluva day to die," as Bonejangles was saying to the newcomer at the entrance.

A perfect sixteen years Downstairs hadn't lessened the impact of seeing new blue faces in the pub door, and Victor had never, in life or death, been known for his comforting demeanor or implicit tact. He tried – he really did try – but too often his attempts to engage the newly deceased ended in him saying things like, "Was it lingering?" or "Well, once you're dead, you don't much need entrails anyway." He'd learned a long time ago to do what he did best and fade into the background until there were drinks to pour and music to be played. No one tried to talk to him when he was at the piano.

It hadn't earned him many friends, but the young man, aged an eternal twenty years and very-nearly five months, really was better off without a large circle of acquaintances. Death was, if nothing else, good for introspection, and Victor Van Dort had realized a long time ago that his was going to be an eternity spent alone because he wanted it that way.

Well, for the most part.

"We'll set you up a nice welcome," Bonejangles continued. "Scare up some friends, pull out the keg…"

The keg. If there was any other way to spend one's afterlife, Victor didn't know if Bonejangles was aware of it. From the entranceway, he heard a small whimper, and took to collecting his music notes with a level of polite engrossment. While the skeleton said in a rather low voice, "Plenty o' reason to celebrate tonight," Victor spared the papers a last glance-through before setting them on the bench and rising to his feet. This was certainly not an introduction he was best involved in.

He coughed when he entered the storeroom, which colonies of dust bunnies had long since turned into a no-man's-land of overturned crates and cloth-shrouded chairs. He stepped over a few boxes easily to reach the far shelf and picked up the cracked leather pouch of tuning forks sitting atop it, still in the same spot he'd placed it three years ago. He rang E and listened to the familiar tone with satisfaction before putting it back in place. When his hand knocked against the bottle of oil he'd come in for, several cobwebs broke off of it and a spider went scuttling away from him.

"Oi!" he heard it squeak when it was fully hidden beneath a box of nails.

"Sorry," he said. "I'll have it back to you in an hour." He hoped he could keep that promise; the container was nearly empty. The spider's foul mutterings were ignored as he wiped corrosion from the metal and drew back again. It was a fool thing for him to always put off the piano's maintenance for so long. Growing up he'd taken pride in servicing his mother's sole inheritance, and once upon a time he'd even taught his wife a thing or two about keeping the instrument in working condition. Now the task loomed before him, specter-like. If he hadn't felt such guilt at the idea of leaving it untuned, he would have avoided it altogether. It carried too many heavy memories. The irony of forcing those thoughts upon himself on this of all days was not lost on him, but they were still more enjoyable than brooding in the poor melancholy of the eve.

Many dead managed to enjoy Hallowe'en, he knew. He was not one of those lucky few, but shook his head immeasurably and tried to cheer up nonetheless. If nothing else, the night was always peaceful. Small comfort, but he would take what he could get.

A thump and a yell sounded from the other side of the door. He paused for a second in confusion, and then when he pulled it open, found a chair being swung directly into his face.

Victor barely managed to avoid the blow by stumbling backward into the closet. The furniture piece hit the door frame with a mighty blow, and the person who had been holding it picked it up again and stumbled away. "Back!" he heard screamed as he tried to find the pouch and the oil, dropped somewhere on the ground. There was a clang on the piano. "Get away!"

"What on earth -?" he asked as he poked his head out of the storeroom again, to find a chaotic scene unfolding before him. Several of the smaller pub tables had been knocked over, and a spotlight was hanging askew. Bonejangles, standing near the bar, shot Victor a look of deep exasperation as he held his detached right arm in his left.

"Calm down -" the skeleton said.

"Don't you touch me," he heard threatened from the stage. Before the piano stood a girl, perhaps seventeen, wielding a chair like a lion tamer and looking scared out of her wits.

"What happened here?" Victor asked Bonejangles.

"Tried to give her a hand," he said, looking disgruntled and waving his arm around. "She took the whole damn thing!"

"Get back," she said once again, a noticeable tremor in her voice. Victor looked up at her and felt a rushing pang of sympathy. He'd done nearly the same thing once upon a time, and with much sharper a weapon.

He'd be hard-pressed to do more harm now than had already occurred. "Come on, now," he said, trying to present a comforting tone as he stepped forward and getting the chair turned on himself in return. The girl's pupils were terrified pinpricks as he looked her square-on, but she was quite pretty, with wide-spaced eyes in a heart-shaped face. Her brown hair was long and somewhat colorless, pasted to her brow with nervous sweat. There was a strikingly familiar aspect about her, but he pushed the feeling back with the same indiscriminate force he did most all thoughts of the sort. Instead he said, "It's alright," and tried to look friendly.

"Things are _not_ alright," she cried. "I'm not – _No!_ Don't touch me!" Her tone snapped sharp as a whip as Victor tried to approach again, and he received a chair leg to the knee in thanks. "Beasts! D-devils!" She paused and held a hand to her chest, hyperventilating as tears beaded in her eyes. Victor looked at Bonejangles, who was struggling to notch his arm back in place. Children were the hardest. They were never ready to leave.

This girl, though, didn't actually even look ready to leave. Her face was not blue, but was in fact turning redder by the second as her breathing quickened. Bonejangles seemed to have caught on to the same, because he said astutely, "Yer not dead."

The poor girl's eyes nearly bugged out of her skull as she pulled the chair ever closer. "Of course I'm not dead!" she cried, tears beginning to roll down her cheeks and a crack in her voice where anger used to be. "I'm not – oh, Lord -" Her chin dropped for a moment as she struggled to maintain her composure.

"Well, how the hell does that happen?" Bonejangles asked.

Victor was as bewildered as he. "Don't ask me, I was escorted down," he said. "And then halfway killed myself the second time, but -" He felt helpless to see the girl's lip tremble. "It's alright," he said again. "We're not going to hurt you. What's your name?" She shook her head violently. "Oh. Well, that's fine. We'll see you through if you just – put the chair down…"

She took a few hiccupping gasps and finally dropped to her knees before the piano, setting down the chair and placing her head in her hands upon its seat. Her shoulders began to shake.

Bonejangles approached Victor from behind, his arm successfully reattached. "Call _me_ a devil?" he muttered, sounding unimpressed. "Who's the one come in here yankin' peoples' limbs off, eh?" Victor just shook his head. Awkwardly, he approached the piano from the side to place the oil and tuning forks atop it for later. The girl just continued sobbing at his feet. At the risk of being struck again, he awkwardly reached down to pat her on the arm. She recoiled a little, but didn't react badly. That was as good a sign as any.

As she lifted her head again, sniffling, he asked, "Would you like something to drink? Tea? Erm… Brandy?"

"W-where_ am_ I?" she asked, avoiding looking at him completely. He didn't think he was _that_ much of a fright to see.

"You're Downstairs," he said, at the same moment that Bonejangles piped up, "Land of the Dead."

"You're all dead?" she whispered faintly.

The tone with which Bonejangles said, "Yeah," was so flat and underwhelmed that Victor almost smiled, but decided it was best not to while the girl was stealing discreet looks up at him, as if indulging a guilty curiosity.

"You're not going to hurt me?" Her voice was weaker still.

"If that in't the damnedst question I've heard all day," said the skeleton. "Where's Ursula when you need 'er?"

Miss Plum hadn't been round in hours. "Why do we need her?" Victor asked.

"Women're comforted by their own kind," Bonejangles said wisely as the girl on the ground gave a watery sniffle and finally sat up. She brushed at her eyes and gazed up at the two of them – or rather, gazed at the ceiling, and interspersed it with frequent glances at both men. The way she bit her lip on the inside was shockingly reminiscent of something he remembered from long ago, but what, he couldn't say.

She said softly, "You." It took Victor a good second to realize that she was talking to him, because she wouldn't look at him as she did.

"Me?" he asked, surprised.

"What's your name?"

"I'm -" He gave a bemused look to Bonejangles, who shrugged. "M-my name – you can call me Victor."

"Oh." Her face crumpled a bit into a resigned expression. She wiped quickly at her eyes before seeming to finally steel herself. "Right. P-perhaps I should have… something to drink." The last word was said with a great amount of apprehension, as if she didn't believe his could have possibly been a real offer.

"Try this again," said Bonejangles, and he once more proffered a hand to the seated girl. She blanched at the sight of his bony fingers, but slowly responded in kind and he pulled her neatly to her feet. Her eyes were still watery, but her face was steady. "I'll take care of the little lady," the skeleton said, gesturing to a table.

"Right," Victor said, "I'll put the kettle on." They said you didn't change much after death, but he was quite proud of having learned how to use the stove.

The water was just on the boil when Bonejangles' singer Dottie May came whisking in the pub's back door, twirling around in circles with a laugh in her throat. She had clearly been having a much better night than Victor had. "Is he here?" she asked of the young man.

"In the pub," he said. "New arrival."

"How exciting," she gasped, and exited the kitchen in a rush. Victor finished steeping the tea and reentered the pub several minutes later with the burnished tray set Miss Plum kept in the pantry. The living girl was standing away from the bar with a rather alarmed look while Bonejangles and Dottie held each other closely. "Jangly," she cooed into his ear as he laughed. The girl stepped away from the two of them a bit. The expression on her face reminded Victor so strongly of his own feelings at seeing the Land of the Dead as one of the living that the scene almost jumped before him like déjà vu.

"So," he said as conversationally as possible, setting down the tray on a table, to which she followed him with an extremely apprehensive manner. "How do you… take your tea?"

"A spoonful of sugar," she said faintly.

He nodded in what he hoped was an understanding manner. "Of course. So do I. Erm…" The sugar in the dish was looking a bit yellowed, but there was nothing for it. He gave her a quick spoonful and hoped she didn't see. She was avoiding his eyes pointedly; he supposed it was only natural for a young lady without a guardian to be wary of strangers.

She pulled her cup close to take a sip, sniffed and recoiled. "What is this?"

"Tea," Victor said.

"It's…" She squinted at the liquid. "Green."

"Lots of things are green," Victor said, a little defensively. He made very good tea. "They're all quite healthy for you." She didn't look convinced, and set the cup down again as Dottie finally pulled away from Bonejangles and swept over to the two of them with an exclamation.

"Why, a breather!" she cried as she took her seat on the other side of the girl, who looked alarmed to suddenly be rubbing elbows with a heavily perfumed, somewhat crispy-looking dead woman. "Poor, dear thing, how'd you end up with us all down 'ere?"

The girl looked nonplussed. "I don't know." She paused. "A man chased me through a hole in the ground."

"Nightmare, dear?" Dottie asked sympathetically.

The first streak of hardness crossed the young lady's face. "It was not a nightmare," she said, glowering.

"Oh, 'course it wasn't, love," the corpse woman agreed emphatically. "Certainly not. Suppose all sorts of strange things 'appen come Hallowe'en, don't they?"

"If it was a nightmare, this would be too," she continued, and suddenly pinched her arm very hard. A rather crestfallen look crossed her face when she failed to disappear in front of their eyes, and Victor was beginning to get the feeling that he might not be needed here. "I was in the cemetery with Mister Toad and the cat," she murmured, "and, and a man came who chased me down into a hole – I can't remember. And then I was here. And everyone's _dead,"_ she said, taking another look around at all the faces present. Bonejangles was as inscrutable as ever, Dottie looked incredibly touched by the story, and Victor just felt awkward. He stood up slowly to vacate the scene, but had only made it a few steps when the girl said to him, "You're Victor Van Dort."

He turned around. She was looking him straight in the eye, frightened but determined. "I am," he said, surprised.

"You're my _father."_ It was said not as a question or exclamation, but as an accusation, and one he felt the misplaced weight of in her words.

"I'm -" He glanced away toward Dottie, who had clapped her hands over her mouth. "I'm afraid you're mistaken," he said, as gently as he could. "I – my daughter died a very long time ago."

"No, she didn't," the girl said, becoming more emboldened and apparently more angry with each word. "No, I didn't! My name is Helene Winnifred Chastity Philomena V-Van Dort, and you're my _father."_

The words didn't hit him like a ton of bricks so much as like an increasing trickle of water. 'I can't be,' he was about to say, but the protest died as his eyes crossed her face again. The girl's lips were delicate and her nose a perfect bow; her forehead was wide and clear and her chin made a neat point. With her statement fresh in his ears, he saw once again the deeply familiar features he had noticed at first glance, this time coalesced into a whole: her eyes were a bit rounder and her brows more heavy, but in all other ways she looked exactly like _her_. How could he have forgotten her face?

This wasn't possible. Victor felt his mouth slacken and his vision swim a little as he tried to think what to say.

His daughter? He had a daughter? He hadn't had a daughter for sixteen years.

The best response he could manage was a weak, "Oh," and then he collapsed heavily against the bar.


	6. An Unexpected Reaction

6

This was an unexpected reaction.

Helene's steely feelings of justified incredulity were dulled a bit when the stranger she knew to be her father fell over like a top-heavy vase, and it was at about that moment that she began to feel as though she oughtn't to have spoken out. This wasn't what she had anticipated – she didn't consider herself a fanciful girl, but a muttered "Oh" and a look of horror were not what she would have hoped to see from her progenitor. Accusing an innocent and clearly long-deceased man of being someone he was not wouldn't be the worst thing that had happened to her that night, but it would be the most embarrassing.

She thought she was taking this Land of the Dead business quite well, but after the shock of the evening's events, that might have just been a sign that her faculties were being lost to her.

Self-consciousness began to burn at her cheeks as the dead woman rushed over to help him steady on his feet. Despite it all, Helene couldn't forget the feeling she'd experienced upon seeing his face in that first moment at the entrance: not affection or caring, but a deep confusion that demanded resolution. Now he was upright again and staring at her with a look of such consumed bewilderment that she couldn't help returning the expression. The woman in the rotting dress was saying something, but Helene couldn't hear what. For a moment the only two people in the room were her and the man called Victor, sharing the same question between their eyes: _How can this be?_

She was shaken out of her trance, though, by the skeleton man with the frightening underbite rounding the table to give her an assessing look with his single eyeball. "Man. You done good, Vic," he said, whistling.

"I didn't -" The man stuttered on a consonant for several full seconds before giving up and swallowing, hard. Helene bit her lip and tried to look away, but was taken by the arms and turned round in her chair towards the woman with bright red lips and leathery skin.

"Is this true?" she gasped, with such intensity that one might have thought her life depended on it. Life or death.

Helene opened and closed her mouth a couple times as the man near the bar said, "Erm, well…" and never finished the rest of his sentence.

"No! I see it!" the dead woman announced, clutching at her necklace of badly tarnished gold. "I can see it in the eyes! This is _fate!"_ Helene absolutely regretted saying anything now. "Where is Ursula tonight? Victor-kins, she must know about this!" She hiked her skirts up lewdly around her calves and went scurrying for the stairs in the corner as Helene blushed.

"'Victor-kins?'" the skeleton man said, sounding endlessly amused.

"I didn't come up with it!" the other gentleman spluttered. Helene still couldn't truly bring herself to think of him as her father, because the more she turned the concept over in her mind, the more absurd it seemed. There were lots of things she'd spent her days wanting before – a goat, a piano, a steadier hand for stitching – but a father was not one of them.

"I'm sorry," she heard herself finally speak in the room's new silence, now that the woman was gone. "I shouldn't have said anything."

Slowly, the dark-haired man came round before her, looking on somewhat sideways. "You look just like Victoria," he said quietly. Helene's mouth dropped slightly open.

The skeleton with the fine hat coughed lightly. "Think I'll leave you two alone," he muttered, snatching a bottle of drink off of the counter before disappearing after his ladyfriend out the door atop the stairs. She almost wished he wouldn't leave. There was no way to avoid a conversation now.

Neither of them moved once they were alone. It was rude, but she couldn't really help staring. Overall, he looked quite well for being more than a decade dead: his skin was blue and his face rather hollow, but he looked whole and he wasn't missing any bits. He wore old but clean brown trousers and a similar white shirt with suspenders – much more lower-class dress than she would have expected from all the photographs of him in fine suits as a young man. He was very, very tall. That was something the photographs hadn't shown her. She said, "I didn't mean to say what I did."

"I can't believe this," he said, not seeming to have heard her at all. "How are you here?"

"I said that I don't know," she said, mindful that she was being churlish about it. "To tell the honest truth, I'm a bit more concerned about getting back."

"Oh." He straightened his back, as if suddenly snapping out of a daydream. "Of course you are. S-silly of me to…" He didn't finish the sentence, but looked away. Helene was momentarily frozen.

"I'm sorry," she said again. "It's been -" She stopped to swallow. "It has been a very distressing evening. Not a very pleasant birthday." Her brief smile was an attempt at levity, but it fell flat.

"Of course," he said, voice still wistful. "It is your birthday, isn't it?" She nodded. "How old, now?"

"Sixteen, sir." The formality was automatic, but she regretted it when she saw a pained look cross his face. He took a deep breath and she found herself wondering how or why he would do so if he was dead. "You, em… you look just like I always thought, too."

"Oh, really?" he asked, peering up a bit.

"Yes. From the photographs. Though you are a bit more…" She couldn't think of a way to say it politely, and finished very quietly, "Off-color."

"Ah," he said, looking down at his own hand. "I've kept rather well, for it all. I think Mother went a bit enthusiastic with the embalming." It was such an absurd thing to hear someone say of their self that Helene couldn't help the smirk that she worked mightily to hide.

"Right," he said, turning a bit and running a hand through his black hair, which even in death was quite a bit more lustrous than hers. "You say you want to get back." He offered her a sort of resigned smile that she didn't think it was appropriate to return. "You'll need a spell for that."

"A spell?" she asked, mystified, as she stood up from her chair. "A _magic_ spell."

"I don't know of many other kinds," he said, proffering a hand which Helene wasn't certain was meant as a gentlemanly gesture or a handshake goodbye. She took it but let go quickly at the cold touch, and marveled at the idea of seeing magic. Everything about this evening had been extraordinary.

Was this it, then? She could be back in bed before midnight, and she would never have to think of all this madness and discomfort again. What would happen if she woke in the morning and it all felt like a dream? Victor had just opened his mouth to speak when he was sharply and suddenly cut off by a screech and a ring that filled the pub like a fire bell and made Helene scream with shock.

_"NEW ARRIVAL!"_ bellowed a squat woman by the kitchen door, and almost instantly the room was being filled with corpses by the dozens and all their cries of joy.

The flood was like nothing Helene had experienced before. Music seemed to follow every individual in their movements, the lights going up and a lively trumpet beginning immediately to play above it all. Men in worn waistcoats and women in chewed dresses came rushing through the upper and lower entrances, exclaiming loudly for the newcomer, and all their eyes eventually did land upon her.

It was hard to not feel a bit horrified as the rotting blue faces pressed close around her, but every one of the spectators was smiling, and not only because their skeletal structures forced it of them. In truth, they looked delighted at their new arrival, some murmuring, "She's alive!" and "Been a good long time since somethin' interestin's happened down 'ere!"

A few broke off to crowd around the bar, offering to buy drinks in celebration. Helene was pushed back into her chair by a small throng of old ladies marveling at the softness of her hair, while their husbands sat back at the wall laughing with one another. A woman wearing an elaborately flowery hat ran her dry fingers through the locks. "Just beautiful, dearie," she sighed. "Do you remember my hair at this age, Augusta?"

"Curly as a pig's tail and brown as like," cackled a skeleton with heavily made-up lashes around empty eye sockets.

"Least I weren't no ginger whelp! Never grow old, sweetie," she advised the girl before drawing away as another woman took her place, making admiring sounds. A man in a balding top hat swept down to kiss her hand and commend her good complexion before marching off with his hand raised for a gin and tonic. Helene was not one to refuse a compliment, but all theirs were making her face burn. She ducked down to take a sip from the tea set out in front of her and immediately gagged. Her mouth was full of dirty water.

As she tried to discreetly clean her tongue of the taste, the short squat woman from the kitchen entrance came elbowing through the crowd, yelling "Comin' through, comin' through!" She took Helene's hand when she reached her and shook it. "I'm Plum," she said genially, in an instant dropping her voice from ear-splitting to merely gravely. _"Miss_ Plum."

"Good to meet you," Helene said, but it was a mighty struggle not to turn the statement to a question at the end.

"I'm to understand this is a bit of a family occasion?" she said conspiratorially. "I've got scones on in the kitchen, but say the word and they'll be a cake to celebrate."

Helene knew a bit about baking, and she had never heard of a way to turn a scone recipe into cake batter before. "It's -" She shot a glance at the dark-haired man called Victor. He had been pulled away by the crowd and looked rather cornered by the woman with the lipstick, who was tugging at his arm and talking enthusiastically. "I think I won't be here long, actually," she said to Miss Plum. The woman looked skeptical, but shrugged and left through the crowd again.

More and more the masses of people were beginning to settle around the pub, taking their turns to filter by the living girl before settling in place at the tables or the tap. "Now here's a crowd!" came a roar from the upper entryway as the large-jawed skeleton returned. He slid down the banister with a howl and strummed up the band that had assembled onstage, which started a harsh syncopated beat the likes of which Helene had never heard before. It was rather cacophonous, but the other patrons seemed to enjoy it. A couple of skeletons took up a game of billiards in the corner and the sound of clacking balls and bones caught up with the noise from the band. It was all so much louder and brighter than anything she had seen before that she felt nearly overwhelmed, but every one of the faces around her was friendly, the room was warm, and her chair was comfortable. From her spot in the center of the pub, everything was open to marvel at, and she couldn't kill the little bubble of fascinated happiness that was rising in her chest.

In the corner of her eye, the man she'd called her father was being pushed toward the lower doorway by the fancy woman with the lewd legs. He looked helpless and seemed to be speaking in low tones as she moved him forward by the elbows, managing after a minute to shove him out the door. Then she turned toward Helene.

"Crowded in 'ere, ey?" she asked breathlessly as she pulled out a chair at the table. "Thought about movin' outside?"

"It's fine," Helene said.

"You think so?" she said, sounding distracted as she looked over her shoulder at the door again. "'Cos our Victor, he said he'd like to talk to you, darling, if you would."

"Oh, I don't know if -" The girl was cut off quickly by the woman pulling out the chair and helping her to her feet, almost before she knew what was happening. She was quite speedy for a corpse.

"Just a few minutes to reunite!" she said delightedly, steering her toward the door very directly. "The crowd'll hold fine, Jangly and I to keep things up-tempo… Oh, this will be so sweet! I do love a happy ending."

Helene was trying to say again, "I don't think this is necessary," when she too found herself swiftly on the far side of the lower entrance. Around the curving corner she was pushed, and immediately the dead woman disappeared, pulling the door closed behind her with a happy sound. Helene brushed at her skirts the way she always did when she was nervous; the dark-haired man was standing nearby. When she finally straightened up, he looked no surer of himself than she was. For a few moments they simply stood there, while the muted music played inside and a very taut silence drew between them.

Victor said, "So."

So. So? So many things! Helene had rarely had so much to say, and still felt such a resistance to speaking any of it aloud that the words felt like weights in her chest. How did one broach a conversation in these circumstances?

"Yes," she said limply, and let the quiet drag on.

It was a very strange place, this Land of the Dead. She still felt a bit too conscious of herself to truly take a moment to marvel at the world around her, but what she could see even just staring at the ground in the middle distance was a wonder. The cobblestones were smooth from thousands of skeletal feet and goodness-knows-how-long, and everything reflection the cheerful lantern light with such comfort that the whole underworld seemed to be rotting green at its core. Somehow, this wasn't as ghastly an air as it ought to be. Her eyes swept over everything around, from the buildings to the misty purpled sky above. When the horse in the square whipped its tail at her, she gave a start.

"I _knew_ it moved!" she hissed into her hand, and then she looked up at the man again. His expression still hadn't changed from a sad sort of disbelief, but perhaps that was just in the nature of his face. He'd always looked much the same in the old tintypes her grandmother still kept in the attic: either resigned or despairing.

"Y-yes," he said again. "Would you like to – sit down, I suppose?"

It would keep her comfortable, if nothing else. The longer she stood, the more she could feel a painful pulse in her right ankle from when she had twisted it in the woods, what now seemed like a very long time ago. "Certainly," she said, affecting herself politely. Familiarity did not seem the right tack to take when the air between them was still so uncomfortably lukewarm. They sat down on the far ends of a bench at the edge of the square, while the horse gazed at them with baleful, empty eye sockets.

"So," Victor said as they worked hard not to establish eye contact with one another, "how… are… you?" In the end, his words were so timid that they seemed uncertain even of their own status as a query.

"Fine," Helene said. "For the circumstances." She shot a glance to the side and then lost her nerve.

He replicated her look in turn. "Strange – strange circumstances, aren't they?"

"Strangest I've ever seen," she agreed.

They were quiet for a few moments.

"What do you – _ahem –_ like to do?" The man tried to strike up the conversation again.

Helene wasn't sure how to answer. "Books," she said after a minute.

"Ah, books," he said with an understanding nod in the opposite direction from which she sat. "That's good. I like books. Also."

Silence followed again for a very long time.

"Do you… play the piano?" Victor ventured one last time. Helene shook her head. "Oh," he said sounding surprisingly disappointed for the level of emotional indifference that had characterized the conversation. "Well, that's – I do hope Mother's been keeping it well, at least?"

"Grandmother doesn't have a piano," Helene said, looking up for the first time out of puzzlement.

Victor too looked up, his eyes very sunken. "She sold the piano?" he said with sad shock.

She said, "I can't remember having one in the house. Grandmother Everglot has one, but I'm not allowed near it." The look on the man's face was a combination of heartbroken and disturbed, but he covered it up quickly and turned away.

"I see," he said, sounding a little muffled. Helene felt horrible. "That's -" He shook his head and turned back, looking toward an overturned table in the square. "Well, I suppose everyone's got to move on eventually, right?" He gave her a quick smile, but she saw it only out of the corner of her eye.

"She talks about you," she murmured.

"Who?" he asked.

She said, "Grandmother," and forced her gaze up, determined not to let it drop again. "She talks about you sometimes."

"Oh!" he said, leaning back in the bench and looking up at the sky. "She remembers me."

"Of course she remembers you," the girl said, feeling it was odd that he had to be reminded. "You're her son."

"And always a disappointment to her." He sighed and placed his hands on his knees. Helene wanted to say something kind, but couldn't, because in truth most of her grandmother's words _had_ always been about her only child's failings and the ways in which Helene was expected to do better.

"Well, let's be honest," she said. "She's a bit difficult to please."

Victor said, "Yes, a bit," and at his thoroughly defeated tone Helene couldn't help smiling again.

"Mrs. Hall is the only other one who understands," she said. A quick look of confusion crossed the man's face as he looked at her again.

"Mrs.… Hall? That…" He rubbed quickly at his forehead. "Mrs. Hall, she's still there?"

It seemed a very odd thing to find so hard to believe. "Yes," she said slowly as he furrowed his brow. "Why wouldn't she be?"

"That… I can't remember," he finished, lowering his hand again and looking highly perturbed. Helene thought of the story she'd heard, about how he'd run away when her mother was ill. He didn't look the type to do such a thing. Or did he? He didn't seem to have much nerve. Whether that meant no nerve to go or no nerve to stay, she wasn't sure.

That train did bring with it another thought, however. There was something very important she had to do before she could go back Upstairs.

"Where's my mother?" she asked.

Victor grew still slowly, his shoulders stiffening and his hands ceasing to grasp at his legs. After a moment of silence, he looked away and said, "She's not here."

Helene didn't understand what that meant. "When will she be back?" she asked, feeling a mounting excitement. Mrs. Hall had always said her mother was a lovely woman, but she'd never imagined they might have the opportunity to meet!

The dark-haired man, though, looked very troubled. "She -" he started, and then stopped. "She can't be here."

That was not a clear answer. "Why?" she said, scooting closer along the bench. He seemed to draw away from her presence a little.

"She's not _here,"_ he repeated, and something about the finality of his last word stopped Helene in her tracks. What did that mean? Where else could she possibly be?

She said, "Well, she is dead, isn't she?" Victor nodded once. "Why can't I see her?"

"I haven't seen her in sixteen years," he said. "She's not here."

Helene blinked. That didn't make sense. "But…" she said, trailing off as she stared at his face. The man looked haunted. She sat back slowly on the bench. What did it mean that a dead person shouldn't be in the Land of the Dead? And why would her mother be one of them? Didn't she know she had people who wanted to see her?

"I don't understand," she said. Victor said nothing. She chewed on the inside of her lip. The name '_Victoria'_ was rushing around the inside of her head, and the more times she heard it, the more sinister a timbre it took on. Where had she last heard it spoken?

_'Dear Victoria,' _she heard hissed, almost as if in her ear, and felt a cold shiver break down her back. "He thought I was her," she said aloud. Victor looked toward her, meeting her eyes for the first time in a long time. "He did! He thought I was my mother."

"What?" he asked.

"The man!" she cried, standing up to run her hands through her hair consumedly. "The man in the cemetery. He called me Victoria."

Victor wasn't following very well. "The cemetery?" he asked. She really didn't understand why he seemed to have so much trouble understanding simple concepts. "Why were you there?"

"I was -" She stopped, feeling suddenly uncomfortable. "I was visiting your grave. If you care to know." She ignored his surprised little 'Oh,' and continued, "But someone was waiting for me there. A man, with a knife! His face was horrid. He chased me down through a hole in the ground – what?" Victor's face bespoke of incomprehension. "It's true! He called me by her name. I tried to tell him, but…" She swallowed and wrapped herself up in her arms. "I think he wanted to hurt me."

"Who was he?"

"I've never seen him before in my life," Helene said, sitting down again, feeling a bit cold. The alleys suddenly seemed to be dark and full of eyes. She would never see him coming. "But he thought he knew me. Said something about a wedding gown and… eels." She really couldn't remember very well after all. "He was dead. He wanted to bring me with him."

Victor was staring with an expression she could not, for the life of her, read. He blinked a few times, placed a hand to his head, looked as though he wanted to say something, and then stopped and seemed to lose it. "I'm sorry," he said, and cleared his throat. "I don't know what that could have been."

"Terrifying!" she promised him.

He tried at a little smile. "If it means anything, I don't think you're in danger."

That gave her pause. "Really?" she asked, feeling relief crest over shoulders.

"Sure," he said, sitting up. He still struggled to hold her gaze for very long, but it was a sporting try. "We've got all sorts here, they don't usually mean harm. Just a bit mad."

The mad part she could agree with; the no intent to harm, she could not. "You weren't there," she said with a shake of the head, rubbing her hands together and feeling a prickle down her spine. "He had a knife and… I think he killed my cat." The fat tom was still nowhere to be seen. Perhaps he was trapped out in the woods, lost after saving her life and soon to be at the mercy of a madman who enjoyed hurting animals. She knew the cat couldn't be hurt anymore, but that didn't stop her from feeling a sting in her eye. She wiped it away quickly.

Victor reached over awkwardly to pat her on the arm. "There, now," he said, sounding far too insecure to be comforting. "It'll all be alright."

"How?" Helene demanded, sliding away from him again in her seat. "You don't believe me."

"Of course I believe you!" he said. "It's just – even the worst of them of move on from that sort of thing, after a while. Why would someone want to hurt you?"

Who could ask such a question? "Because that's what people _do,"_ she said. She brushed off her cheeks a final time, beginning to feel too angry to be sad anymore. The blue madman had hunted her down, threatened her life, killed her cat, and called her by her mother's name – and now the man she termed her father, who couldn't even look her in the _eye _properly_,_ didn't seem concerned in the least. It was fortunate that she knew how to manage without parents so well, because clearly they weren't good for much.

The man looked like he was about to apologize, but she didn't let him speak. "I think I should go home," she said under her breath.

Victor's jaw slackened a little and he seemed to be at a loss for words. "…Oh. Are you sure?" he finally managed.

"I'm sure." So be it if no one believed that she could be in danger. She simply wouldn't stay. It wasn't as though there was anything else here for her.

"That's…" He didn't finish that sentence. "Well, then. I suppose I'll… fetch a spellbook." He stood up and took a sideways step toward the alley. "And be back." She wasn't going to protest. He lingered a second longer and finally broke away with long slow strides, disappearing into the darkness of the alleyway in seconds. Helene watched him go and then curled on the bench miserably. She supposed it was only fair that he might want her gone as much as she wanted to go, but a little bit more of a fuss on his part would have been nice for posterity.

There wasn't a soul to be seen. Even the horse was ignoring her now. She sat in the square for a long time, feeling cold and alone and more and more like someone should just leap from the shadows to stab her in the heart and get it over with.

* * *

><p><strong>Happy Halloween, everybody! Don't forget to drop a line to let me know what you think of the story; your feedback sustains me, like festive pumpkin-shaped peanut butter cups and boxes of raisins.<strong>

**(O lord, I just compared you all to Halloween raisins; I'm so sorry.)**


	7. Thought and Memory

**My computer possesses a rare and deadly allergy to the substance commonly known as "Adobe Flash Player," which means I've been unable to finish watching the _Legend of Korra_ finale I was promised ****tonight****. This update is to give me a reason to stay alive until alternate links go up online in 3-8 hours. Pray for me.**

7

As Victor approached the tower library, he had the distinct feeling that he had screwed up badly, but wasn't quite sure how. It wasn't to say that his wits were entirely about him at the moment – he could hardly see straight – but surely he'd have noticed if he'd done anything egregious. All of the last hour was a blur, passed before he'd even noticed it begin.

She didn't like him. Out of all things, that was the most clear. He supposed it wasn't unexpected: shared blood had never stopped anyone else from finding him a disappointment. And it wasn't as though he'd spent much time fantasizing about the relationship he might have had with a child he'd thought dead (even if he couldn't remember why), but he would have hoped she might at least have found him interesting. Or tolerable. His own actions hadn't helped; he could have stood to act like less of a prat. He just didn't know what to think. An hour ago, everything had been normal. Now he was a father. _Father._ The word sounded strange and wrong. He couldn't even recall the last time he would have applied that description to himself.

What had she said her name was, again? Henrietta? Willow? Now it was too late to ask. The only fully-formed thought he could hold on to was that they had once been going to name their daughter something else, but he couldn't remember what. There were quite a few things he had spent quite a lot of time not thinking about for quite a number of years, but others were genuinely lost to him. There was an itch in his brain that told him something was missing, as if he had just opened an encyclopedia and immediately forgotten his object of inquiry, but that was a common enough feeling that he couldn't tell whether it was related to this incident or not. It all sort of slipped away into a gray fog after enough time underground.

If he tried, he thought he could remember a nursery, sunny and yellow, but when he relaxed it was pulled back under the soft blanket at the back of his mind. He'd forgotten so much. None of it had ever been important before now, and maybe it still wasn't. She was going to leave, and everyone would move on from this night as if it had never happened.

Perhaps it was for the best.

Victor had traversed this path so many times that he was halfway up the tower stairs before he realized he'd almost reached his destination. Once upon a time he'd had great difficulty making it even this far; fatigue was one thing he couldn't envy the living for. At the top he rounded the corner and knocked gently on the open doorframe. From within the depths of the library, a strangled cry sounded and several ravens scattered for the rafters.

"Al… Alphonse?" Victor called into the room.

"I'm here!" came the response. There was the sound of several books falling to the floor, and then from out of the jungle of tomes emerged a head of bright red hair covered in dust. A knobby young man in deacon's robes seemed to swim out of the mess on the floor before emerging in front of Victor, brushing himself off discreetly. A raven swooped down to land in his nest of hair. "Ha! Off, Huginn," he laughed, waving the bird away. "Mister Van Dort! How can I help you?"

"I'm looking for a spell to get someone Upstairs," he said, stepping inside and following the man with his eyes as he shuffled about, picking up books and setting them in careful piles.

"Well, you know what I always say," the young man huffed as he placed a particularly wicked-looking tome atop the nearest stack. "_'Why go up there when people are_… wait… oh! – '_dying' to get down here?'_ Eh?"

Victor was sure he'd heard that one before, but decided not to say so. "It's not for me," he admitted, and the man looked up.

"Oh, alright," he said. A precarious stack at his elbow finally went tumbling over. "Cripes…" Alphonse had been the sole caretaker of the library for nearly a year since the Elder's leaving. He and Victor were of an age, or thereabouts, and they talked on occasion. The gingery young man had said once that he remembered the other from his days as an acolyte under Pastor Galswells Upstairs; Victor wished he could say the same, but of all the days of his life, the ones spent in church had been some of the least impactful. Alphonse did not feel the same. He talked often of achieving a diaconate at only eighteen years old and was clearly proud of the achievement of his young life. He would have become a vicar had things gone according to plan, but then a burn from a candle flame had festered, and could still be seen scarring his freckly blue forearm yellow and green.

"I mean, nothin' wrong with needing the spellbook for any reason," he continued as Victor looked back up. "No shame. Hallowe'en, after all… Men always have their reasons to go Upstairs this time of year."

"It's really not for me," Victor said. "It's -" He wasn't sure how to explain it. "It's not for me," he repeated lamely.

"Alright, then." A pause staled the air between them. "Feel like lending a hand before?" the red-haired man prompted. "I think I've figured out the arrangement for shelf B. Just got to – to get 'em all up there…"

Victor hesitated. He had said he'd be back to the pub soon, but neither did he really want to return too quickly to the unhappy scene he'd created. Perhaps it wouldn't hurt to take a few minutes for himself. "Sure," he said softly, and knelt down to pick up a fat leather book, which Alphonse took from him with thanks.

For a few minutes they worked in tandem, one calling out a letter and subject and the other searching for relevant tomes in the small city of titles at their feet and above their heads. Once, a long time ago, Victor had visited to see the books sprawled from wall to wall and nearly touching the ceiling, with only the smallest paths between. The Elder Gutknecht, for all his wisdom and good graces, had never been much for organization. Things were a hair better under his protégé's greater eye for order, but the tomes were still innumerable and ancient. Victor had heard they were the ghosts of burnt volumes, but nobody really knew where they came from, and they came often. It seemed there was never enough room for them all.

As shelf B began to take form upon the wall, spines straight and all loose pages tucked back in place, Victor stopped to look up. The sky was clear this night, nearly black, with a green shine at the edges. He'd heard of a phenomenon in the north, described now and again in books; what was it called? _Aurora._ He'd never seen it, but they said it was something like this. They both were quite beautiful.

'Aurora.' What a pretty girl's name that would have made.

He must have looked stricken, or perhaps he'd just stopped moving for too long, but either way Alphonse took notice. "Vic- Mister Van Dort?" he asked after a moment, startling the dark-haired man out of his trance. "Is something the matter?"

Victor looked back to him. "No," he managed. It was the least assuring denial ever uttered since the last time he'd tried to lie convincingly.

"Oh." The deacon looked doubtful. "You sure? You can talk about it. I mean… Man of the Church, and all." He plucked awkwardly at his robe.

"Just a bit distracted," Victor said, feeling very hollow. _'Did you know I have a daughter?' _he wanted to say, but the very word tasted wrong on his tongue, and he felt worthless for thinking so.

A raven let out a low moan as it flapped over their heads and dropped a feather between them. Alphonse kicked it away lightly. "Mighty distraction, then. You look like you've died all over again."

"I – nothing, I suppose."

"Come on now." The young clergyman plopped down between a few books and looked earnest. "Air your sorrows. This is what the Lord… left me here for." His voice cracked a little when he said that, but he cleared his throat and seemed unbothered.

Victor just shook his head. There wasn't much use dwelling. She was going to leave, and then all of this unease would be a non-issue again. In enough time, maybe he wouldn't remember her at all, but for now it felt like there was a worm eating away inside of him, which there very well could have been but for the fact that he had checked himself for decomposers very recently and found nothing. This was a deeper ache, rooted in a lot of thoughts he'd not dredged up since longer ago than he could remember. Once upon a time, he'd been ready to be a father, but that day was long gone. The girl he'd spoken to in the square was someone else's child entirely.

"The spell," he said aloud. "It's for… my daughter."

Alphonse looked upward, thoughtful. "I didn't know you had children."

"Yes," Victor mumbled, picking up a book from the ground and weighing it in his hand. "Neither did I."

"Oh. Funny thing. Where's the story there?"

"Do you know, I thought she was dead," the man said, sitting down slowly against a book blockade near the wall. A raven hawked and fluttered over to his shoulder, weighing him slightly sideways. He had never been much for birds, but at the moment felt glad for the company.

"Strange," Alphonse mused, placing a few books atop one another on the ground near where he sat and whipping an organizational catalogue out of his sleeve for future consultation. "Why's that?"

"I can't remember," Victor said.

"Ach. Hate it when that happens, don't you?"

"It was never a problem until now," the man muttered. The raven swayed on his shoulder for a second longer before taking off again and cuffing him about the head as it did so.

"I can't remember my da's name," Alphonse said, sounding uncharacteristically sad. "Had to write it down not to forget." Victor could still remember his father's name, and his favorite toy, and the layout of his kitchen. Miscellany. It sometimes seemed like only the important things were lost to him – his wife's face, his last moments. His daughter's existence. "How did she die?"

"She's not dead yet." The deacon looked up with captive attention when he heard that.

_"Really!"_ he said, placing aside his paper and pushing the books away. "That's incredible! How did she end up here, then?"

"Stra – strange things happen on Hallowe'en, I suppose," Victor said, beginning to feel uncomfortable. It seemed wrong to share anything when he himself knew so little. The young deacon must have sensed his unease, because he stopped asking. For a moment Victor sat in silence while the other man returned to gathering books from the ground and shooing birds from his work every half-minute. The one called Muninn, with a distinctive gray patch on its breast, fluttered down to land upon Victor's knee and offer a judgmental look. The sky above roiled above them all in green and black. Midnight was drawing near.

What an incredibly strange night it had been.

He could never admit to anyone just how little time it had taken for him to forget Victoria's face. The concept of her was still close – the sweetness, the warmth, and the great emptiness left where she'd once stood at his side – but her lips were a blur to him and her eyes long gone, like she'd only ever been a stranger in a dream. Now, for the first time, he couldn't get her visage out of his mind, even if it wasn't hers, not entirely. He saw the girl speaking to him on the bench instead, her mouth forming shapes so familiar the past seemed to come to life in their wake, but her eyes harder than Victoria's had ever been, her brows more furrowed even in relaxation. The more he thought about it the more the recollections blurred. Suddenly it was Victoria sitting in front of him in a coat and long socks, and then he imagined the girl in a fine dress with her hair tied back. He pressed his palms against his eyes.

Things had all been so much _better_ when they were forgotten. Now the memories were coming back, piecemeal and jumbled. There was a collection of Shakespeare's works sitting on the bookshelf. A red-spattered dinner napkin. A butterfly on a gate, and a grim iron bed in a dark room. None of it meant anything, but left him feeling worried nonetheless. He lowered his hands again and took a deep, useless breath.

He'd wondered why someone would want to hurt her; _"That's what people do,"_ she'd said. Was that right? It had been so long since he'd been hurt that it was almost hard to remember the meaning of the word. In the spotlight of his mind, a rat crawled into view and gave a gleefully beady glare that made the bottom drop out of his stomach. What was that thought behind it? A wedding gown and a scimitar and -

"What's her name?"

Victor was startled out of his stupor so sharply that he jumped in his seat, and Muninn went flapping away with a complaint to land on the deacon's shoulder instead. "What?" he asked, more loudly than he'd intended to.

"Your daughter," Alphonse said. "What's her name?"

"I -" Victor was surprised to find himself shaking. He thought he almost felt _ill,_ if he could properly remember what illness felt like. "I don't know," he admitted.

"Oi," the ginger man said.

"Well, I was a bit distracted!" Victor said defensively. He wrung his hands above the floor. "I know it started with an H. I think."

"Mm," Alphonse said, turning back to the shelf with a heavy armful and beginning to place the tomes away. Victor knew he ought to return to helping, or at least return to the pub, but a great melancholy had settled over his shoulders. He could no longer remember what he'd been thinking the moment before. It was probably just as well. So absorbed he was in his despondence that he didn't notice as Alphonse began to slow in his shelving and presently stopped altogether.

"It's Helene," Victor heard him say after a moment. The dark-haired man looked up to see the deacon staring rather blankly into the air.

"Pardon?" he asked.

"Yes. Helene Van Dort." He remained still for a moment before shaking out of it and placing a hand to his head, bemused. "It – gosh, it was a long time ago, wasn't it? I would have said something, Mister Van Dort, I – I didn't remember till just now." Victor stared blankly. "But I saw her. Always at service with her grandparents on Sunday, putting up a fuss about her gloves. I knocked over a bookshelf once after service and the Pastor put me to right it before noon or get the cane – I'd forgotten about that." A pained expression flitted across his face as he looked at the mess around him. "The girl, Helene, she decided to help me."

"Really?" Victor asked.

"Yes." He looked pensive as he leaned against the wall. The raven flapped to steady itself. "Little thing. Eight. Maybe younger. Helped me clean up and never said a word. Funny child." He stroked Muninn on the head with two bony blue fingers. "I'm sorry," he said again after a moment. "I didn't know."

Victor wasn't sure how to respond to that. The story evoked a strong image of a little girl and a lacy pink dress, crouched over the floor in a dusty room with her brows furrowed in concentration. Even in the vision she didn't smile. Her life (life! Why had he thought she was dead?) had been full to the brim with such mundane little moments, and he'd missed every one of them. She seemed none the less for it.

Victoria hadn't needed him either, in the end. Seeing her face again was a sorrow when it came with that remembrance.

"She would have been better off not meeting me," he said despondently.

"The girl?" Alphonse looked surprised. "Why under Earth would you think that?"

"Well, she's done fine without so far."

The deacon looked skeptical. "Well, I dunno. Lonely girl, I always thought." He sat down again, his bony knees cracking. "Never saw her speak a word but to introduce herself, you know? Sat with her gloves off and wouldn't sing hymns. She looked like the sort who could have used a proper family. Not to speak for any involved, of course, sir."

Victor stared at his hands in front of him, which looked still and useless. It was easy to imagine the girl in his mind glowering at the pulpit with her lips pressed tight. Hadn't he, too, always been too frightened to sing? And Victoria hadn't ever been able to make friends, either. Her childhood had been one of time spent alone in a home too big to suit solitude, and it wasn't difficult to see their daughter living much the same life now. He'd once fantasized about making a home full of music and good food, a little household of three without concern for scowls and foul gossip. Crisp falls and wet springs, Christmases that smelled of cinnamon and summers with the windows open – together, things had been going to be different. He'd forgotten about that fantasy. Now instead a thread of loneliness seemed to have been drawn up through all of their lives, and he had a hard time believing his poor legacy hadn't been the cause of that for the girl.

Helene. Her name was Helene. He wasn't going to forget that again.

Alphonse asked, "What happened between you? It's not right to see a family in distress."

_Family._ Good Lord. "I've made a terrible mess of things," he said, laying his arms by his side. Not for the first time, he wished Scraps could be there with him. He missed that little dog. "She said that one of ours tried to hurt her and – I didn't know what to do."

"One of ours?" The young deacon looked lightly disturbed. "Strange. I've heard of goings-on in the woods, but I thought it was a rumor to put children off their guard for Hallowe'en-time."

"So did I." Something felt so close to the surface of his memory that it nearly hurt to press it further. He'd never once heard of someone trying to make such bad trouble, and yet the idea of it happening felt unshakably familiar. The girl had looked truly scared, and what had he said? _"They don't mean any harm."_ Stupid! Had Victoria ever been worried for her well-being, he'd have been up in arms about it, no matter how strange a risk it seemed. Why should he react any differently for his child?

Because she was his child, after all. A stranger, yes, and someone who might be better off without his company, perhaps – but his child still. That was clear enough. No matter how alien she might be to him, however much of a ghost, her aspect was not all that of his wife's – the great difference still lay in her eyes, the heavy sloped brows that, he realized now, had come from him. How much more could it take to make him come to his senses?

"I need to apologize," he said.

"That seems like a good first step," Alphonse nodded agreeably.

"I treated her like she was an inconvenience and – oh, Lord," he said, climbing quickly to his feet while the gingery young man watched in surprise. "I hope I haven't ruined things entirely." He made a quick rush toward the door, stumbling over piles of books. "I've got to get back."

"Do you still want your spellbook?" Alphonse called at his retreating back, but Victor didn't seem to hear. His footsteps clacked down the stairs for several seconds before fading. "Right," the young man said after a moment. "Good talk. Man of the Church, and all. Glad I could help." He stared down at his robes for a moment before the raven called Huginn came flapping down to land on his head again. "Agh. Gerroff, you big dumb bird," he moaned, and the young clergyman continued shelving his books as always, with the whispering company of wings overhead to carry him past midnight.

* * *

><p><strong>Let me just say that God forbid if I'd had to deal with video problems for<strong>_** Breaking Bad**_**'s last episode because I'd probably be in prison**** right now**** for assault.**


	8. A Duck in the Rain

8

Helene sat alone for what seemed like a very long time before she finally decided she ought to go inside. She sat up on the bench and stretched out her aching legs, which had begun to cramp from her position originally taken out of general misery and soon maintained to ward off the cool air. Her long socks and ankle boots peeked out from beneath the skirt's blue hem as she relaxed; what a fool she must have looked. She wasn't dressed properly for a romp around her bedroom, let alone late-night respects and all else that had followed this mad evening. A great depression seemed to be caving in her chest, easy to ignore and painful to contemplate. Maybe he wasn't coming back. He hardly owed her any favors.

Blue light spilled from the pub door as a skeleton stumbled out in front of her, laughing and tipping his drink wildly. She sat still until he had passed into the road across the square, from which a yelp and a sound of clattering bones presently sounded. A tibia came rolling back out with a rattle, and Helene stood up warily and edged toward the pub as his mumbled curses made themselves heard.

She didn't feel much like being a part of a crowd, but where else was she to go? She reentered the building sheepishly, hoping nobody would notice. The light in the pub was low and the crowd had settled considerably. Dead men and women were gathered at the tables and tap with their attention turned to the stage, where a skeleton in dark glasses was playing a sharp plucky music which Helene lacked the vocabulary to properly describe. Perhaps Victor could have told her more, but she disliked the idea of having to ask. Maybe she should have learned some piano after all.

A few voices called out to acknowledge her return; she offered little smiles back to the friendly stiff faces, but let her hair fall in front of her eyes after they looked away again. Her seat had long since been taken by a couple of women in feathery hats. One sipped politely at the tea still sitting at the table: "Delightful!" she heard her cry. "Who made this?" Helene slumped up to the corner of the bar, where an empty stool sat wedged between the countertop and a jutting beam in the wall. She squeezed in and pulled herself as far away from the rest of the crowd as she could, hoping not to attract the attention of the waiter, who, though she might have been mistaken, _appeared_ to be a shrunken head scuttling around on a bed of cockroaches.

The man in the next seat over glanced her way once before doing a double-take. "Hey!" he said, turning on the stool with a bright smile. "You're her!"

She looked up but kept her hair in her face. "Am I?" she said, trying less than her best not to sound grumpy.

"I heard we had a breather here, but got in too late – good to meet you!" He offered her an eager blue handshake. "My name's Townley. Henry Townley."

"Helene Winnifred Chastity Philomena Van Dort," said Helene, finally meeting his handshake. Despite his skin being cold as ice, he seemed to radiate warmth toward her, and she could feel it even through her foul mood. Even if he hadn't had mold edging an empty earhole, he couldn't have been called handsome. His sad-looking eyes were dwarfed by the great tombstone of a nose around which the rest of his long face was arranged, but the crooked-toothed smile beneath it all was very fetching. He couldn't have been much older than her.

"Helluva name!" Henry said enthusiastically before backtracking. "I mean, uh – sorry, miss."

Somehow, she just couldn't bring herself to be offended. In truth, she would have rather liked to do a bit of offending herself. "Yes," she said. "It is a hell of a name, isn't it?" That came with a little thrill. "And this has been a h-_hell_ of a night." The knowledge that her grandmother would not, _could_ not appear here to cuff her around the head made her feel strong, and a strangely happy flavor of mad. The word tasted sweet. She ought to curse more often.

"So you're a Van Dort?" the young man asked. She paired her nod with an uncertain shrug. "Huh. Family reunion tonight, eh?"

"Yes, family," she said faintly. The word made her feel even less comfortable than she'd been out on the bench.

"Victor's a good sort," Henry said amicably. "Best pianist in the house. Offered to teach me a bit once, but I lack the dexterity, m'self." He raised his left hand and wiggled the fingers, which looked like they'd been badly smashed.

"Ugh. Goodness," said Helene. She wasn't sure it was polite to ask.

"I was dead already when they did that," he said, looking down at the digits with a slightly bothered look. "And cut off my ear. All for spite." He pointed to the ear hole with mold growing around. "You'd think once they'd got my coin it'd be enough, wouldn't you?"

"What happened?"

"Robbed on the road," he said. "Suppose they wanted to cover their tracks."

Helene looked at his crooked blue fingers again. "I'm sorry," she said. "That's awful."

He shrugged easily. "Could have been worse." Helene didn't believe that for a minute, and indeed he quickly corrected himself, "Well actually, it doesn't get much worse. But even the worst isn't so bad. I like it here." He took a quick gulp from his stein and then slowed, beginning to look sad. "Wish I could have let Mum know what happened to me. Where all the money went."

Helene laid her head in her hand, propped up on the countertop. Despite his awkward laugh and rather knocky elbows, she found something engaging about the young man. Maybe it was just in having someone treat her like a girl again, rather than a shocking revelation, and despite herself, she was morbidly interested in his story. "Money?" she asked.

"For school," he said. A pained look crossed his face, and he drained his drink and placed it on the countertop with a small hiccup and a sway. "Mum wanted a doctor in the family, bad as anything. Wasn't much money to go around, but she always found some to put away. 'Doctor Townley,' she called me sometimes." A sad little smile tugged at his lips as he stared at the bartop. "My big brother wanted to be the one, but dropsy took his eyes. Mum'd be happy just knowing there was a Doctor Townley somewhere out there in the world, so I guess it was left to me to go."

"And you were robbed on the way?"

"My fault for showing money at the inn," he said, rubbing his arm. "I deserved it, really. Just wish it hadn't hurt Mum so."

"I'm so sorry."

Henry gave a respectful bob of the head. "I'll see her again sometime. Sad thing I failed her, but I'll sure be glad when she turns up." He wrung his broken fingers. "Least you don't have to worry about getting robbed anymore once you're dead, eh?"

"Don't you?" Helene asked. She didn't wait for an answer before continuing, "Is it true you haven't got criminals here?"

"Oh, loads of criminals," he said, looking surprised. "They don't do crime anymore, though. Why would they?"

She intently studied the shine on her fingernails while a cold curl slithered into her stomach. "A dead man tried to kill me tonight," she muttered. "You tell me why."

"I can't think of a single reason." They sat in silence for a minute before he glanced shyly over at her again and gave a small nudge. "But, hey, no need to worry such things now that you've got an older brother around to protect you again."

Helene continued to stare at her hand for a few seconds before his words caught up with her. "Wait, who?" she asked with a sharp look upward.

Henry blinked at her. "Mister Van Dort," he said. "Victor."

What on earth was he on about? It took a moment for her to reprocess his words, and when she did it was with an almost painful start. "Oh, goodness. He's not my brother," she said.

"No?" The young man straightened up, as if an improvement in posture could make up for the mistake. "Apologies. I thought, with the last names -"

"No, he's -" She swallowed a little bit and suddenly wished someone would serve her something to drink as well. "He's my father," she finished, a little weakly.

"That's… oh." The possibility seemed not to have crossed his mind. "Gosh. I'm sorry." She didn't say anything. "I just thought – you're not so much younger than he is."

Still she didn't speak, but she knew he was right. What another perfect reason for it all to feel so abnormal. How could she see a father in someone only a few years her senior? A heavy blanket of misery unrolled over her back as she slumped forward. "I didn't mean to upset," Henry said remorsefully.

"No, it wasn't you," she said. "You're… you're fine." She was very wary of the prickles in her eyes. "I just need -" She left the sentence unfinished and turned toward the wall, struggling mightily to keep her chin strong. Her own upset was causing her far more distress than anything else. Never before in her life had she had many emotions demanded of her, and she felt quite comfortable that way. Now she was just a mess, a foolish lost girl with mismatched socks and a family so fundamentally broken that they couldn't properly talk to one another. It should have been easy to let the experience roll off her back like a duck in the rain, but instead she _cared,_ and deeply resented that caring. It was a mighty struggle to calm and quiet her breathing enough for the tears in her throat not to be audible.

A cold hand patted hers awkwardly atop the counter. "There now," Henry said. The look on his face said he feared he was the source of her anguish. He may have been a stranger, but he was a very kind one.

"I just didn't ask for this," Helene said abruptly as she turned back with a furious scrub at her eyes. "It was all fine before tonight and now everything's gone to rot."

"Uh…" The poor boy seemed helpless to offer advice or comfort. Looking a little desperate, he patted her hand again, and his crooked fingers mashed clumsily against her own.

"I mean, you do _believe_ me, don't you?" she asked, looking up perhaps a bit too intensely, because he shifted back several inches in his seat out of surprise. "You believe me when I say a madman with half a face wanted me dead?"

Henry looked utterly baffled. "I suppose so," he said, placing a hand on the bar for balance. "Why would you lie?"

"Exactly!" she said. She swiveled back around and laid her forehead in her hands, staring down into the shadows between her elbows. "Why would I make it up? But he didn't believe me. Not ten minutes and he thinks me a liar." She swiped discreetly at her nose. "I don't care. It doesn't matter. But doesn't it seem awfully unfair?"

"Yes?" Clearly he was answering as he knew she wanted him to, but she was glad to hear the affirmations aloud anyway.

"Well, I shouldn't take it," she said, pushing her hair back over her neck and drilling holes into the glassware behind the bar with her eyes. "I understand, you know, he didn't ask for me to show up. Probably was doing fine without me. But I won't stand to be insulted. I'll leave, and not bother him again."

Henry was completely silent for a minute. "Wait, are we talking about your father now?" he asked.

"Father!" she snorted, and pressed her hand quickly over her mouth to stop the rather watery outburst. "I shouldn't even use that word," she said after she'd swallowed her upset again. "It's not the right one. Do you think people have to be a family just because they're related?"

"Ye- no?" the young man said, beginning to look around desperately with his hand up for service. "Em – perhaps you'd like a drink? Wait, no. Do wealthy ladies drink?"

She was beginning to go rather hot in the face. "I… Yes, why not. A drink, and I don't care what," she said, feeling angry and bold. It was much more reassuring than feeling sad and helpless. Henry raised his hand a little higher and the waiter approached across the counter. Much as Helene would have liked to believe she'd been mistaken before, he was indeed a lone head balanced upon a swarm of cockroaches.

"And 'ow may I help you?" he asked thickly.

"A pint for me, please," Henry said pleasantly.

In contrast, Helene put great force into it when she announced, "I would like something _vile,"_ using her grandmother's word for most men's drinks.

"Zat I can do. Ah!" His jumpy little face suddenly brightened considerably as his eyes crossed hers again. "But you are certainly ze Madame Van Dort! I had heard you were here to visit viz us, _finalement!"_

"Yes, well. You've all been very kind, but I can't stay long," she said. "I really ought to be back by morning."

Though a disembodied head, the waiter was still capable of a very understanding nod. "Zey Upstairs would not let a lady go from zem for long, eh? Ho, ho!" At the sound of his laughter the cockroaches scattered into a frenzy and reformed again, clearly excited. "It eez a shame, but _nous comprenons_. You would be missed from home. We 'ave heard much about you, _la_ _femme extraordinaire._"

How was that possible? "Really?" she asked.

"Oh, _oui._ Eet will be a shame to see you gone. But your 'usband, Madame, ought not you be spending ze evening in 'is company?"

The realization of her second mistaken identity didn't come as a shock this time so much as a dull thrill. "What?" she asked, clenching her fist so tightly that she felt she might draw blood from her palm.

"Monsieur Van Dort," the waiter said in surprise. A clicking cloud of cockroaches came skittering over the bar to deposit a frothing mug before Henry and a wicked-looking cocktail in front of Helene. She stared at the glass with blurring vision and a loud buzz beginning to fill her ears. "Madame?" she heard the waiter ask. _"Vous allez bien?"_

"I -" She blinked rapidly and tried to drink from the beverage before her. Immediately, she choked, and ended up spitting the liquid back into the glass with a slight heave. She wasn't quite experienced enough to know whether the foul taste was a product of the Land of the Dead or of alcohol as a substance, but now her mouth was burning, and finally, it seemed, she couldn't hold the tears back any longer. With a small sob she turned and slipped off the stool, stumbling on her bad ankle and then limping out through the crowd.

"Miss Van Dort!" Henry called after her. She didn't turn around.

Just as she reached the entrance, a mashed hand caught her shoulder to slow her down. "Miss Van Dort," Henry said again, and she turned around to find him right at her heels.

"What do you want?" she asked. It was impossibly hard to keep her hurt inside anymore.

"I don't -" He appeared bemused as anything, but drew her off to the side of the room with a determined look. "Really, I don't know. But I can't let a lady run off in a tiff."

Helene wiped at her eyes with a fist. "They didn't know," she choked, leaning against the dirt and brick wall behind. "Nobody knew, not you or the waiter or even the, the madman – they hear 'Van Dort' and they think I'm anything other than his daughter. Because he didn't tell anyone he had one. He didn't _care."_

"Well hey now, that's not necessarily true," Henry said, scratching the back of his head abashedly. "It… might have been that…" He trailed off slowly, and failed to reinstate the sentence for quite a good few seconds.

Helene sniffed. "You see?" she said, slipping down to the floor. She wrapped herself up in her arms. "I suppose it's fair enough. I didn't think of him much, either."

Henry sat down next to her in the corner by the door, leaning his head against the wall and taking a deep breath. "Why do you do that?" Helene asked suddenly.

"What?"

"Breathe." She mimicked the action herself, a little more wetly than he had. "You're dead."

"Oh. Yeah, I am." The dead man took another breath, just as if to prove himself it had happened. "Just habit, I guess."

Helene held herself a little tighter. "So dead people can remember to breathe, but they can't remember they had families," she muttered. "Fortunate."

Henry actually looked surprised at that. "Well hey, now, everyone remembers different," he said. "Me, for one, I'm pretty sure I had a sister once, but hell if I remember her."

"That's awful," Helene said with narrowed eyes.

"I try," he said, and he sounded very sad. "All the time. She died only a few years old. Can't even recall her name." He lifted his head again from the wall. "I don't think I'd remember her at all, but she was the reason Mum wanted another medical man in the world. If we'd had a doctor, maybe my sister wouldn't've gone." He shrugged. "Some things stick with you down here. You can't much change what doesn't."

"You'd see her here, though," Helene said. "Your sister. Wouldn't you remember her then?"

"I've never seen any little ones down here," Henry said, rubbing a finger along his brown eyebrow. "Some older, but no babes. I always imagined they got a bit of a pass on all this."

"Do you know that?"

"Oh, no, nobody knows much of anything," he said. "But you get a good idea."

Helene laid her chin on her knees to wallow in the mire of unhappiness bubbling up around her mind. Hadn't Victor said he thought she was dead as well? Where would he have even gotten such an idea? Probably something he'd told himself on purpose in order not to spare her a thought. "I just don't understand," she murmured into her hands.

One last time, Henry tried to give her hand a kindly pat. "I'm real sorry," he said, and sounded it. "Mister Van Dort's the right sort, though. Yours is a good family, I think."

"I don't think it's much of a family at all," she said. Her hand trailed over her coat pocket and touched on a hard lump. Curious, she reached inside and was surprised to find her lamp-lighter still safe in the lining. She'd forgotten she'd brought it with her. Something about the cold little brass box against her fingers was oddly reassuring. She flipped it open and clicked the wheel twice, and a tiny orange flame sparked to life with a hiss.

"Fire!" Henry looked astonished at its sudden appearance. "How under earth…?"

She let loose on the wheel's base and handed it to him. "It's like flint in a box. Hold it down and flick – yes, like that."

Henry had to try quite a few times to get the fire to jump up in his hand, and dropped it straight away when it did. Helene took it from the ground and brought the flame back herself, staring into its golden heart with such intensity that it started to leave impressions in her eyes. "That's incredible," Henry said, craning his neck closer. "Where'd you find such a thing?"

"Mrs. Hall bought it for my birthday," she said. It felt like it had been weeks ago.

"It's like something from the future. What year is it up there?"

"1897."

"Oh." He sat back with a startled look. "God blind me. It's been longer than I thought."

The girl clicked the lamp-lighter off and on again. After a few minutes the metal no longer felt cool in her hand, but comfortably warm and slick. What had Mrs. Hall said about it? 'A grown girl could stand a gift with more utility than a golly-doll,' or something of the sort. It meant so much more now to know that at least someone considered her a proper woman, rather than a harsh surprise or potential object for kidnapping. She dropped her head over her knees with a sigh and wrapped the lighter tightly in her hand. "Mrs. Hall is going to have a fit if I'm not back by morning," she said after a moment. "I need to go."

"In this state?" Henry asked.

"I'll be fine," she said snippily, stowing the lighter again and looking over to meet his eyes for the first time in a good while. "This is nothing I can't move on from."

The young man looked mystified. "But why d'you want to move on from it?" he said. "He's your dad."

Helene gave a little rolling shrug and tried to appear unperturbed. "We don't have much in common. No point in forcing it." She fiddled with her coat sleeve in the weak spot she often picked at. "He's a stranger to me."

"Well y'know, someday my brother's going to show here, and we'll be strangers too," he said plaintively. "He'll be an old man, while I'm still…" He pressed a hand to his chest, skinny and youthful. "But we'll have to get over it and figger things out again, right? And it'll all be alright in the end. That's what a family does."

"This is hardly the same," Helene said.

"Well, I don't see how," Henry said stubbornly. "And I can't believe anyone could go on back Upstairs without regrettin' not tryin' to work things out first. Not today, maybe. But someday."

Helene was about to protest again, but it dawned on her that he wasn't wrong. Someday she was going to be a dead old woman like the ladies with the fine hats; wouldn't it be infinitely worse to have to hash things out with her father then, when they were both stuck together? Selfish a reason as it might have been, the potential for future discomfort did move her.

A small mean worm in her heart hissed at the idea of softening her anger, but it was also shrinking. "Maybe you're right," she said dully.

"I like to think so!" said Henry.

"I mean, it's not every day you learn about life after death," she said, giving him a sideways look. "I suppose I'll hate myself someday for not trying to learn a little more."

He said, "That's the spirit," and gave her one hearty clap on the back before catching himself and reverting to a friendly shoulder pat. "Now I think we ought to have a drink to celebrate. How about a nice warm pint? Nothin' so harsh this time."

"I guess that could be nice," she said. He made an earnest smile and rose to his feet to approach the bar again, leaving Helene on the floor. She looked down at her coat sleeve; a hole was beginning to form in the well-picked spot that fell between her index finger and thumb. She gave a sigh and dropped her hand again. When she looked up she was surprised to find a small brown rat sitting at her side, giving her a scrutinizing glare.

She gazed back for a moment. "Go on," she said. "Don't stare. Shoo." The rat turned around slowly and slithered into a hole in the wall just as the doors opened with a clatter and someone tripped inside. Her eyes shot up and she was surprised to see that the newcomer was Victor, looking harried and glancing all about.

"You!" he said suddenly as his eyes finally landed on her, sitting on the ground only a few feet away. "I-I mean… Helene." He hadn't ever said her name before. Even still, she instinctually raised a hand to her chest as if to ask, 'Me?'

"Ye-yes," he said, panting despite clearly not needing to breathe. "I just came back to – I realize I made a terrible mistake and – and I'm sorry." She became acutely aware all of a sudden of what a fool she must have looked, sitting in the corner like a child. She pushed herself back up to her feet as he said "I don't suppose you – would you like to go for a walk, maybe?"

Helene looked toward the bar, where Henry stood with a stein in each hand and a surprised look on his face. When their eyes met, he gave her a little nod, as if to say, _'Well, go on, then,'_ and set one drink down on the counter, where it was immediately snatched up again by a laughing man with an axe in his head. She turned back to Victor, who looked terrified with anticipation.

She tried to smile. "That might be nice," she said, and his relief was visible. He reached behind for the door to push it open for the both of them, and they stepped back out into the night air, one after the other.

* * *

><p>Far away in the woods, the screaming was finally dying down.<p>

Beneath the tree branches' vaulted ceiling, there was no wind to stir the tattered cloth of the silent circus. The dead leaves on the ground had not moved in decades and the air was stagnant as a tomb, but the ancient metal structures of the tents and booths still groaned, apparently under the sheer weight of their own existence. The bitter man was in his usual spot within the grand tent, having finally retired to his seat once again after taking out his rage on the trees outside. Within, the ambient glow of the misted sky barely cracked through the torn canvas enough to light the room, but the colony was unconcerned. Near-darkness was more than enough to see by.

Lord Barkis Bittern had said it many times now. "Slippery," he muttered to the rat called Benjamin, perched upon his shoulder like a great brown worm. "I should have known. Should have planned for the contingency." The rat chittered, rattling like a tin can. "Yes, and brought you too, dear friend. Yes, I should have. In the end, it's my own fault, isn't it?" Benjamin ground his teeth.

Far off in the shadows near the wall, there came a small rustle and a shift. Light winked in briefly beneath the canvas before shuttering out again, and a small rat with an intelligent gleam in his eye approached the seat in the center of the room. "One of yours?" Barkis asked of his friend. Benjamin made a heavy jump into the other's lap and squeaked lowly at the newcomer, who responded in turn. The big brown rat crawled slowly back up the madman's chest to settle by his ear and chicker.

"Really?" Barkis said when he heard the words. "She is there, then?" The small rat on the ground titted in affirmation. "Fascinating. Oh, this is very good indeed." He stroked Benjamin gently along the back. "I suppose we will have to resort to plan B, then, won't we, my friend? Oh, yes. And you'll arrange it all to perfection, I just know." Barkis sat back in his chair with a creak and a curling smile. "How good it will be to hurt her again."

The rat called Benjamin closed his eyes in contentment.


	9. Daughters Leap

9

Everything was off to a very worthy start. Now Victor only had to hope fervently that he didn't manage to foul it up again.

He considered it a good sign that they remained more or less side-by-side as they walked. It was hard to avoid the temptation to glance off toward the girl every few seconds to gauge her reactions, but her face remained placid and her eyes mildly engaged in the sights that they passed in the street. She skipped to a brief stop as they passed the Bloody Fountain on Botched Appendectomy Avenue, and frowned curiously at a wicked, long-dead owl which had made its home in a crumbling brick wall. What an experience it must be, he thought, to see the Land of the Dead with fresh eyes. He didn't recall very much of his own first visit, beyond a general sense of terror and confusion; the girl seemed to be enjoying herself as much as anyone could be expected to. Victor led her carefully through the area near Blackbowels' Square, a downtown filled with black shop fronts and services carts. How nice it would have been to be able to show off the town when it was at its bustlingest, but there was nothing to do for it tonight. Anybody not already at the Ball and Socket had certainly made a conscious decision to head Upstairs or be alone for the evening; no stores were open, and there was nobody passing on the street. It was, for all intents and purposes, a ghost town.

In ten minutes' walk they reached the long, shallow staircase leading up to Daughters Leap and ascended together, her before and him behind. She walked noticeably widely, taking the steps two or three at a time as though she were much taller than she actually was. It was indelicate, but Victor could hardly fault her for wanting to climb quickly. He always did the same thing. As they rounded the top, she let out a surprised "Oh!" and he followed her out onto the small lookout, with a wooden bench and familiar view. Daughters Leap had once been his first true look at the Land of the Dead, more years ago than he could count. It seemed as good a place as any to make a proper introduction. Victor stayed by the wall while Helene leaned out over the edge of the viewpoint with wide eyes and a small smile. She did have a pleasant smile when she chose to show it. The skyline stretched across the whole horizon to the east, spindly and black against the dark green atmosphere. "It's enormous!" she said, not really to him. "How long does it go for?"

"I'm not sure," he admitted.

The girl looked back with a question clearly in mind, but for whatever reason chose not to ask it. She lingered at the guard for a moment longer before slowly leaving the ledge to sit upon the bench and pat her skirt down, her face beginning to fall from interest back into determined inexpressiveness. He liked to believe they were at some sort of understanding for giving this a second try, but she was curiously difficult to read. "S-so I wanted to ask," he said, stepping forward to take up her spot perched awkwardly against the railing, "really, this time… how are you?" She looked up and he smiled as welcomingly as he could. The girl frowned.

"This has been the strangest night of my life," she said.

"I can see why you'd feel that way," he said equably.

"I went to bed last night with everything quite normal. I didn't – I didn't have a family and -" She stopped, but his mind ended the sentence for her. _'And I was perfectly alright with that.'_ "Though I suppose that's not fair," she added after a second. "Grandmother and Grandfather have always been good to me."

"Are they well?" he asked.

"Quite well," she said.

"The canning?"

"Oh, yes." She rubbed at her nose a little. "Grandfather wants to open a factory up north in Pearshire next year. Business is good. He'll be buying tin while the price is down. I sit in on his talks with Dr. Nottermann some Wednesdays."

Victor listened to even the lightest of business talk with surprise. "I never paid as much attention to the fish as I ought to have," he admitted, fiddling with his collar again.

Helene in turn pulled her hair over her shoulder and began to comb it with her fingers, catching every few seconds on a tangled lock. "I didn't have much choice but to," she said. "My husband will run the company someday. Grandfather expects me to understand enough to keep him up to speed."

"That seems reasonable," Victor said absently, before fully realizing what she'd said. He swallowed and ventured, "N-now, when you say, ah, _husband. _ You aren't -"

"No. Not for Grandmother's lack of trying," she said sourly, dragging her hand down with a yank that made her glower with the effort to not wince. "The village boys aren't good enough for us, so she goes out to her, her baronesses and dukes and asks after every well-bred son with inclinations toward business." Her fingers were trapped again, and she struggled to pull them through the tresses before finally giving up in visible anger and throwing all her hair behind her shoulder again. Victoria had never been one to grow frustrated so quickly. "Not that I want a village boy, either," she added hotly.

They were both silent for a few seconds. "Those were always the worst sort," Victor said finally.

"Who?" she grumbled.

"The well-bred sons, with inclinations toward business." He smiled again as she met his eyes. "Rather boorish, I think."

"You don't know the half of it," she said with her hands steepled over her mouth. "She brought me to Oxford in June. Lord Ruttersby took a liking to me. He's eight years my elder," she added with a tone bespoke of conspiracy, and kicked at the ground. "He spent four days talking about his family's butchering enterprise and how we were perfectly matched to feed every mouth in the Empire. Grandmother said we can do better than a viscount. Maybe she'll keep looking forever."

"I remember that," he said without realizing he'd spoken. Helene looked up. "Waiting," he clarified. "For someone to tell you whom you're going to… m-marry." She propped her cheek up on her fist and cast her eyes to the ground.

"You were lucky, though," she said in a low tone. "I hear you and Mother got along famously."

"Yes," he said, and tried not to think about it. "We did."

She took a deep breath that could have bespoken of either frustration or sadness, but told him no more than her face did. "It won't happen for me."

"Well, don't give up hope yet," he said gently, but she stayed quiet and looked back across the skyline. She took so long to speak again that he thought she was done talking altogether.

"I've never gotten on with anyone," she said, and with the words, he recalled walking through the village square as a child, watching the other boys fastidiously ignore him while they played knucklebones. He gripped the rail tightly with a dozen things to say and an uncertainty as to whether any of them was the right one. Helene looked perturbed, but must have noticed it at the same moment that he did, because she fixed her expression up immediately and seemed to decide that it was time to change the subject altogether. "So," she began again impassively, brushing her hair behind her ear so that it fell immediately back down in her face, "you said you don't know how far the…" She gestured to the town at large. "How long it goes for."

"No," he said. "No, I – I haven't been far from home."

"Well, that seems mad," she continued with a somewhat distrustful curl of her shoulder. "I'm sure no one could possibly live in a place like this and not do a bit of exploring."

What a jarringly familiar sentiment. He picked at his shirt collar with the feeling that he was being accused. "Yes, well," he mumbled, "Before I died I – I thought the same." He could remember that. "I don't suppose any living person could see the view and… not imagine it. But you find a routine and it all sort of goes out of your mind." He waved a hand vaguely in the air. "It's not so different from life Upstairs, here. Things come up."

Helene was looking up again with the strangest expression on her face he had ever seen. Had he said something? Her countenance was deeply disturbed, but she pursed her lips and ultimately said nothing of it. "Well… bosh," he heard her sniff. She turned to the city again. "I'd hardly do anything else if I were dead."

"You'll get to someday," he said. The girl gave him a peeved look and he bit his lip. "I mean – th-that's incredibly depressing -" He was an idiot. He let his voice catch for a minute before falling forward with a quick, "I'm sorry. I'm not v-very -" Tactful? Articulate? Smart? All applied, and her expression clearly said that she had noticed.

Victor started pacing with an agitated little twitch for a few seconds, before stopping abruptly and looking her straight in the eye. Her face did not change. "You know, I just thought I – I owed you a proper apology. For how I acted. Foolishly, I mean. I acted f-foolishly. I didn't expect…" The end of the sentence dangled for a good moment before he gave it up completely and let his shoulders sag. "I'm terribly sorry," he said.

The girl picked at her sleeve and said, "It's alright."

He didn't dare believe her. "Really?"

She was the one looking away from him now. Her voice was a bit sad. "Well, yes," she said, straightening up on the bench. "I mean, it's – it's not as though being family means two people must get along."

He didn't know what he'd expected to hear. "Oh," he said. "No, I suppose not."

"And I should apologize too, you know," she said. "For imposing on you."

"Oh, no, no," he said, protesting perhaps a bit too quickly to sound as though he meant it. "Never."

"Here, now, don't lie," she said, looking up finally with a very dry, pointed look. "I'm not delicate."

"I'm – I'm sure you're not," he said. He truly hadn't thought of her as an imposition for even a second. As a surprise, yes – as a bit peculiar, certainly – but not as an imposition. "I do mean it."

She lowered her chin and shifted on the bench. "Well, it's good of you to say so." Her profile struck him as he looked on; she cut an odd form on the bench. Her dress was distractingly chaotic, with mixed-up socks and a navy skirt under a shirtwaist and brown frock coat. Victoria for one would never have been seen dead so underdressed. Neither would she have let her hair grow so tangled, and too long to manage, or even let it down at all outside of bed-time. He could almost see her standing in front of the bureau and pulling out each pin so that the locks fell around her shoulders one at a time, and brushing her hair a hundred strokes before retiring, while the bedroom lamp lent the brown tresses a little shine of gold. The girl was looking at him very curiously as his mind wandered, her face far heavier and more skeptical than Victoria's would have ever been. _But she's not Victoria, _he thought, and pushed the memory from his mind.

Yet he knew he wasn't the only one who had noticed the resemblance. _'He called me by her name,'_ she had said before. What, what under earth was it that made him feel so uneasy at remembering those words? An uncanny idea niggled at the back of his brain, calling to mind something like a bad dream – too long ago to remember, too horrible to forget. _'A man, with a knife!'_

"I do believe you, you know," he blurted, with the sudden feeling that maybe he hadn't made it clear before now. He scrambled to seat himself on the bench next to her as she looked up. "What you said, about the man. In the c-cemetery."

"Oh, that," she began to protest, but he rushed ahead of himself to at least finish before he ran out of nerve.

"No, now, I know that stranger things have happened. I-I _lived _most of them. And just because I don't understand something doesn't mean…" He shook his head and took a deep breath. "I mean – all I mean to say is – I do believe you. And –" He looked over with a timid smile, "I p-p-promise I wouldn't let anything hurt you. I'm sorry." He thought perhaps he ought to pat her hand, but the moment felt wrong, and the girl seemed less touched by his acknowledgment than he would have hoped.

"I wouldn't worry about it," she murmured, shrugging away from him a little.

"I think maybe I _would,_ now that I've thought it out some more," he tried to assert, but she would have none of it.

"No I mean – I wouldn't worry because I… I suppose I oughtn't be here long anyway." She was avoiding looking at him with steadfastness. "Mrs. Hall will have a fit if I'm not back by morning. You can imagine."

He felt that he could indeed imagine being on the receiving end of the housekeeper's ire, though he wasn't certain it had ever actually happened. "You're still going to go?" he asked.

"I have to," she insisted, looking up and pursing her lips in a manner shockingly reminiscent of her grandmother, the Lady Everglot. "It's just a matter of practicality. And maybe -" She glanced at the sky as if expecting to glean a sense of time from it. "Perhaps we should be getting back about now."

Victor stayed seated as she stood, brushing off her jacket with a sharp, decided brusqueness that certainly hadn't been inherited from him. He'd managed to botch it up after all, then, and once again wasn't even sure how. He'd thought things were going _well_. "I'm sorry," he said once more.

"There's no need to apologize," she said briskly as she moved past him to light upon the downward stairs again. Helene took two steps and then stopped, apparently having noticed that he wasn't following. They stood in silence for a second before she sniffed lightly and said, "Thank you for the walk. It's a lovely view." She looked back to Victor and bit her lip as if she wanted to say something else, but did not, and continued down without a further word. He watched her go with a growing empty feeling, and as she disappeared raised his head to the sky.

He'd failed again, then. With every effort he knew how to make, he'd failed. If this was what his best attempt at fatherhood looked like, it really was better off for her that he'd spent all of her life dead. He stood and walked slowly back to the guard, leaning upon it to stretch his neck out into the air and see just how far the buildings really did go for.

He truly couldn't believe it had been seventeen years since he'd first set foot here. In just a few years more he'd be at that special anniversary by which a man finds he's been dead longer than he was ever alive, and what had he done with all that time? Not any exploring, certainly. What under earth had he found more important for so long?

Victor was so absorbed in his thoughts that he didn't notice the sound of quick footsteps making their way back up the stairs, or a very flushed Helene resurfacing with her skirt bunched in her hands to avoid tripping and a cross look on her face. She stared at him for a good minute before managing to catch his attention with a loud, deep breath.

"Actually, I've decided I'm not leaving yet," she said loudly as he turned back to look at her in surprise. "I'm not much for being involved in others' business, but there's something I just _can't_ get out of my mind." She dropped her hem back around her ankles and stood straight-backed as a soldier with a scowl and very heavy brows. "What on earth did you mean when you said you'd thought about going exploring Downstairs, before you died?" He blinked at her. "Exploring. In the Land of the Dead, before you were dead. You wanted to. You said that."

Had he? Victor pulled at his collar a little bit. "Oh, well, yes," he said, while the girl stood before him with squared shoulders and a piercing look. "That's a rather long story."

Her eyebrows raised an impressive distance. "Well, I'm very interested to hear it!"

"I don't -" Victor stopped and ran a blue hand through his hair, pondering what to say next. "I d-don't remember much," he said tentatively, because it was only half true. "It was a very long time ago, and -"

"Bollocks!" Helene blurted, and immediately clapped her hands over her mouth. "I'm sorry. No, I'm not sorry!" She marched back to the bench and sat down with great force, splaying her skirt across the wooden planks and crossing her arms solidly. "I am not moving until you explain just what _exactly_ you meant." And she took a deep breath and lowered her chin to glare at him.

Victor wasn't entirely sure what to say, or how to begin, or even whether he still had the whole story in him anymore. Sometimes he spoke casually of things he could hardly remember when he actively tried to, and others found himself trapped in daydreams of the past that disappeared immediately upon their realization. His was a long and sordid tale at the best of times; he did remember that it had started here, though. The long familiar view over Daughters Leap hadn't changed in the least, and that was a moment he'd likely never lose.

Best to start at the beginning, then. "Well. Erm." He took looked down. "Has anyone told you that your mother and I were both married to other… people… before we wed?"

The expression on the girl's face said clearly that no one had. "That's impossible," she said slowly.

"I assure you it's not," he said, and took a few long steps forward to sit upon the far end of the bench from her. She noticeably kept well to her end. "It wasn't v-voluntary on either of our parts, but Victoria was wed for several hours to a nobleman who…" He couldn't remember the lord's name. "I suppose it's not important. Whereas I rather – _hrmm_ – married… a… corpse."

She took it better than he expected by failing to react at all in favor of giving him the flattest look he'd ever seen. "No, it's true," he said, rubbing the back of his head. "Nobody believed me then, either. I made the mistake of practicing my vows on the wrong grave and – well."

Helene looked incredulous. "You didn't really marry a – a _dead_ man?"

"Woman," Victor said tetchily. "Goodness. Yes. And she was… very kind, actually. Not that it was a proper marriage, what with her being dead." The girl seemed to be slowly sliding away from him. "Now, you asked," he said.

"You're mad," she said.

"I'm dead!" he said, raising his blue hand well for her to see. "Is it really so hard to believe?" The girl frowned but said nothing. "Yes, good. I had a bit of a run-in with the Land of the Dead before I died. There's not much to the story."

Of all the things he could have said to get a rise out of her, he would have thought that to be one of the least likely, but clearly he knew her even less well than he thought. "Not much to the story?" she asked, looking like she'd been told her hair was on fire. "My father married a _corpse!_ How could I not have heard of …" But then she stopped and pressed a hand to her mouth. "Oh no," she whispered. "The greengrocer's son -" She looked at Victor as if with new eyes. "It didn't actually _happen?_"

"What?"

"The dead, walking the earth!" she said, wringing her hands. "We were sure he was only telling tales."

"Oh, the wedding? Yes, that was us." Victor was slightly affronted that their grand celebration had amounted to nothing more than a disbelieved children's tale in the end. "Pastor Gallswells never let me into the church again after that."

"You raised the dead?" she asked faintly.

"They raised themselves," he said. "It was a special occasion."

The girl's pallor didn't speak well of her bearing, but in a few seconds she took a deep breath and seemed to steel herself. "Alright," she said, voice even and face placid. "Please… do go on."

"Oh, yes. Your mother was wed to a nobleman whilst I was away, so the… the corpse woman and I thought we'd go Upstairs to make a proper marriage. But there were confounding c-circumstances, and…" What had they been again? "Well. It didn't go according to plan, anyway. She left, and Victoria and I were married two weeks later. That's… the end."

Helene kept looking at him for a moment, clearly expecting more to the story despite his wrap. "That's it?" she asked.

"Yes," he said.

"But… you've only made more questions! Who was Mother's husband? Where did the corpse woman go? Did you say you married her twice? How can – how can all this have happened and no one _told_ me?" She buried her head in her clawed hands with a strangled cry.

Victor would have taken his words back if it meant being able to allay her confusion and frustration. He placed his elbows on his knees and wished sorely there was something more he could do. "I'm sorry," he said to her. "I can't remember much more than that."

"But they're the important parts," she said accusingly. "How can you forget all the most important parts?" He thought he heard a sniffle, but when he looked up she had turned away with her hands clenched in her lap. What more could he say?

He said, "I'm sorry."

She didn't respond.

Silence crawled between them like a spider, and its silken thread was leaden with regret. Victor wished so badly that he could have done anything at all to answer her questions, which were swiftly becoming his own questions as well. The gaps in his memory felt like cavernous wells into which the past had been dropped and might never be recovered. The corpse woman. _The corpse woman._ She'd had a name, he should have known her name, and yet he'd titled her like an extra in a play. It felt like the ground had been pulled out from underneath him. The girl at his side on the bench hadn't moved, and still had her head turned out toward the city, as immobile as stone.

"How did you die?" she asked him quietly. "And don't say you don't remember," she added before he had a chance to try. "You all have to at least know that much."

Now it was Victor's turn to maintain the silence. "Your mother was very ill," he said finally, but it didn't feel much like his voice at all. "I thought maybe – maybe there could be a cure for her, here, but in the end…" The guardposts along the edge of the leap stood like a condemnatory jury. "I didn't make it." He took a deep, false breath and tried to unclench his hands.

"I failed."

The words hung in the air like cobwebs that should have long since been cleaned out. From a far-off rooftop, a raven took wing and soared across the sky above their heads, almost invisible against the black but for the glassy glint off its wings. "Mrs. Hall," Helene said jerkily, "said that you left the house one day in perfect health and came back that night to die. Mother p-passed because of…" She gave a watery sniffle, and he carefully averted his eyes to allow her privacy. "Because of me, but you, they never knew why. B-by all indications -" She took an audibly deep breath to steady her voice. "You should never have died at all."

Her knuckles were white against the bench's dark wood. Her chin was steady, but her eyes were wide and forward-staring, as if she was afraid of what might happen if she allowed herself to move. The sight of it split a little crack in his heart. Had she spent her entire life wondering why she'd been left alone, in the wake of a father who should have lived long and old? Could she have ever thought that, perhaps, his grief for Victoria had proven stronger than his desire to stay with her?

"I had to," he said, with the hollowest of hopes that it might stand as any sort of comfort. "I had to die, to come down here again." Helene hiccoughed and finally broke her thousand-yard stare, turning to him with watery eyes.

"You died for her, then?" she asked in a small voice. "You did that?"

Victor looked at his daughter with the strangest feeling. "Of course," he said, and he hoped that she could see that he meant it, truly and with all his heart. "For both of you. And I'd do it again."

Helene bit her lip and tears began to stream down her face. "Why did she leave, then?" she asked with a sob. Off to the south in the maze of rooftops, the library tower bells were beginning to chime midnight. "Why wouldn't she stay here? Didn't sh-she think I'd _need_ her someday?" She turned her head down with shaking shoulders.

To take her hand and wrap her warm fingers securely in his cold ones seemed the most natural action in the world. "I don't know either," Victor said, with the sorrow of deeply shared pain. "I don't know." She shook with tears, and the two of them held hands at the top of the world, while each peal of the bells echoed off the sky around them like a sweet lost ghost.

* * *

><p>They took their time coming down from Daughters Leap, walking slowly and without an excess of noise. Victor considered it a good sign that they remained more or less side-by-side as they walked. It was a show of solidarity, maybe.<p>

They approached the Ball and Socket with a sad air between them and, for the first time, something resembling understanding. Father and daughter stopped before entering the pub and stood across from each other in the dark doorway, Victor somber but smiling, Helene dry-eyed and maudlin.

"You really ought to be back before morning," he offered.

"Yes," Helene said. She took a deep breath. "Thank you for your time tonight."

"I wouldn't have spent it any other way," he said. He meant every word of it. "This has been the most interesting Hallowe'en I can remember."

That made her blush a bit. "And my most interesting birthday, by far." She hiccupped. Victor smiled. He was sad to see her go, but it was time.

He pushed the door open for her and gestured her inside. "After you."

She smiled back. "Thank you."

And in a solemn but considerate silence, they entered the pub together.

_"THEY'RE BACK!"_

The din that took up in the Ball and Socket immediately upon their entrance was shocking and swift. The lights in the room went on immediately and the two found themselves greeted by what could have been a dozen dead men and women, surrounded by half-hanged paper streamers and bright, slamming music. Hats were thrown playfully to the ground at their arrival, and laughter came easily and raucously. Bonejangles was sitting up upon the stage, grinning maniacally and tuning a cello.

"Caught in the act by the guests of honor!" Dottie May swept up to them in a feathery dress and planted kisses on both of their cheeks, an action neither of them had been anything near expecting. "But we're nearly done anyway. Oh, this is going to be perfect. We've had threescore attendees _répondent_ so far and we're expecting more. It's time for a party!"

Helene looked exactly as baffled as Victor felt. "What…?" she asked slackly.

"Midnight's passed, darling," Dottie said, pinching the girl's cheek so that her jaw snapped immediately shut. "The longest part of the night's over, we've a deathday to commemorate, _and_ there's a family reunion!" She threw her hands up in the air ecstatically. "Why wouldn't you celebrate? We're throwing a ball, dearest!"

Helene looked to her father with slightly desperate eyes that he felt helpless to offer aid to. "I don't think I can," the girl started. "I have to…"

"Change? Don't you worry about it, sweetie, we'll fix you up right as rain." Dottie spun the girl around and took her by the shoulders. In the corners of the room, two skeletons on ladders finished hanging their banners along the ceiling.

_HAPPY DEATHDAY VICTOR! WELCOME DAUGHTER_

"But -" Victor tried to interject.

"Think nothing of it!" Dottie said cheerfully as she steered the girl away through the crowd. "It's a little something for all of us! Put on your finest, Victor-kins. This is going to be a night to remember!"

* * *

><p><strong>This chapter was a pain in my ass to write, but I'm glad to have it done, because it represented the last hurdle before we start getting to the fun stuff. Like dancing, and dresses, and kidnapping, and torture. Fun stuff.<br>**

**If any of these characters mangle their French, it's because they're bad at French, and not because I'm using Google translate to spice up the dialogue with fancy words. ¡Si yo sólo tenía tomado frances en escuela secundaria en lugar!**


	10. The Devil's Ball

**This chapter was written listening to Eugen Doga's _My Sweet and Tender__ Beast,_ a lovely waltz that I am now pushing on all of you._  
><em>**

10

Helene was swept away in a whirl of skirts and feather boas, out of the pub and through dark doorways onto twisting stairs out in the open air, which in their turn led to more doorways and finally into the brightest, most colorful room she'd ever seen. Sheer chewed red and purple cloths were draped across the windows and walls, like the silk of a very happy spider, and the dark-wooded furniture was some of the plushest and most ornate she'd ever seen. Against one wall lay a very delicately made-up coffin, pink as a mouth. Around the room at vanities and in lounges sat three other smiling ladies in various states of dress and decay, who turned eagerly as they entered the room.

"Drop the curlers, ladies!" the dead woman with the boa announced, presenting Helene to the room like a pedigree dog. The others did, promptly, and gathered around with little gasps of excitement. "This poor girl needs a gown," said the woman, patting her on the shoulder. "We couldn't have our living guest so underdressed, now, could we?"

"What under earth is she wearing?" asked a blonde woman in a blue dress, tugging at Helene's jacket.

"I was in a hurry," she stated.

"And what has she done to this lovely hair?" cried another woman with a burned and patchy scalp under her silk hat, pinching the tangled locks with her fingers. Helene batted her away as the third snuck in from behind to wrap her hands around her waist, prompting a twist and a yelp from the girl.

"Ooh, Dottie, she's just about your size!"

"Perfect," said the one who'd brought her in. "Then to the boudoir!" and Helene was taken by four sets of bony hands into a side room with a tub of water and a wardrobe.

"I really shouldn't be staying for a ball!" she said a little desperately as they took her coat and began unbuttoning her shirtwaist, gossiping amongst themselves.

"Nonsense, dearie!" Dottie said cheerfully, throwing the waist across the room. "Everybody enjoys a party. Now, into the tub!"

They seemed to make a team effort of dunking her in the tepid water and wetting her carefully from head to toe. She sat wide-eyed and shivery as they combed her damp hair and tied it up above her head, and scrubbed her with the grainiest soap she'd ever felt until she was pink and raw. They cleaned under her arms and between her toes, laughed uproariously when the latter caused her to flail and slip underwater, and then pulled her out and bundled her in towels in the center of the floor.

"Lovely," said the blonde one.

"Much better," said one with red curls and one eye, and she immediately went to work drying her hair with a towel while the other three pulled open the wardrobe in all its glory. Helene had never seen such an assortment of gowns and skirts and hats and blouses, in colors so gaudy she could imagine her grandmother having conniptions at the very sight of them.

"Purple!" Dottie suggested, holding a swatch up to Helene's skin.

The one with the burned head said "What about green?" and laid a necklace of jade-colored stones against the girl's arm while the redhead continued to fluff her hair to a shiny bounce.

"Oh, no, no, she's much too pale. She'll look like a toad. A nice, sunny yellow, perhaps?"

"Oh, Greta, it has been too long since we've seen the sun, hasn't it?"

"It has, Phoebe. Navy? Umber?"

"Teal!"

"What about this?" the blonde asked, holding up a bodice that was made of nothing more than sheer black lace.

"Um," Helene gulped, "I don't think that will work."

The woman grinned wickedly. "Always worked for me!"

"Oh, no, I've found it!" Dottie announced, and pulled out the most deeply crimson skirt Helene had ever seen. "It's a little patched, but that just adds to the charm, don't you think?"

"Perfect! Beautiful!" said the other women in a chorus.

"I don't think it's my color," Helene tried to say, but as with everything else, she was ignored. With the one-eyed woman still diligently combing her hair, she was spun around and strapped into a corsage. They bolstered her dress with petticoats and underskirts, put a bracelet of red glass beads around her wrist, and tied up her hair with bows and innumerable pins, every one bringing an eye-watering pinch.

"Oh, that's good," said the redhead.

"But we're missing a touch," the one with the ruined hair said. She reached into a box to pull out a small cylinder of red lipstick, and applied it to the girl's lips with a finger. "There we go," she said gently. They turned her toward the mirror.

Helene's mouth dropped.

She looked like a princess. Granted a very brazen and raggedy one, but a princess nonetheless. Her skirt was shabby at the hems and had a conspicuous stitch up the seam, but it was full and beautifully bloodred, like a poppy in spring. Her top was covered by a rather small sleeveless bodice with sewn patches as bright as the skirt. Her plain brown hair had been swept up into a beautiful bun with delicate curls left in front of her ears, and the red on her lips completed the ensemble. She looked a vision in scarlet. She turned around once to see the dress from all angles, clasping her hands in disbelief. "It's beautiful!" she said. The women beamed. Doubt settled on her shoulders, though, and she bit her lip and added, "But I can't wear it."

The blonde one gasped in surprised disappointment. "But why not?"

"Just look at it," she said, holding out her bare arms. "It – it's hardly being dressed at all. And the color…"

"Oh, darling," said the one-eyed redhead, coming up from behind to clasp her shoulders. "Red is your color."

She wanted badly to agree. "Won't everyone think poorly of me? I look like a… a…" She knew what she meant to say, but looked around at the happy painted faces of the other women and decided better. "I can't."

"They've all seen worse," said the patchy-headed one kindly. "Or you might say, better. Oh, goodness, wait till you're here for your first Valentine's Day!"

"Or Boxing Day," said the blonde dryly. "Or Good Friday. Or most Fridays." The others giggled and brushed at her to shush.

"Have you been to a ball before, dearest?" Dottie asked kindly. Helene shook her head. "Well, you'd want to look nothing less than your best for the first, wouldn't you?"

She bit her lip. She felt very much like an indulgent child loose in her mother's party clothes. "It's my birthday," she finally said. "I could stand to indulge myself."

The other ladies smiled and laughed, and Dottie gasped, "And it's your birthday, too? Oh, darling." She took her friends by their hands and pulled them to their feet, spinning around in a little circle with happiness. "This is indeed going to be a most wonderful night! Come on, now, girls -" She threw her boa around her neck with great emphasis. "We have a party to attend."

* * *

><p>Victor only managed to salvage his one suit with the generous help of Black Widow and her sisters, as was fairly standard for his escapades into fashion. The seams were frayed with moth damage and neglect; it had been longer than he could remember since he'd cared for it. He stood in front of the mirror in the kitchen of the Ball and Socket making last-minute adjustments to his cravat while Widow perched interestedly on his shoulder, suggesting changes and easing wrinkles where she saw them.<p>

"How long has it been since you've worn this suit?" she said as she triple-checked his collar for flippage.

"Not since my funeral, most likely," he said, nervously patting down the waistcoat again. She came back around and settled on his hand with a sympathetic look.

"I'd almost say you look nervous, sweetie."

"Almost, yes," he said a little dully.

"You're not much for parties, are you?" she mused, folding down his sleeve. "Goodness. If I had such a suit I would wear it every day. What fine silk."

He smiled at the little spider and brushed his hair back with the other hand. "No, I'm not much for parties," he said, focused on a few errant strands above his forehead. "It's a k-kind gesture on their part, but…"

Black Widow checked his cufflink a final time and gave it a pointy little pat. "I'm sure you'll find some way to enjoy yourself, dear," she said, before jumping down onto the table. Outside the kitchen door, the sound of the crowd was picking up. He turned around. "Just put on a smile and the rest will come naturally."

He smiled at her indeed, though he knew well that nothing social had ever come naturally to him. The noise from outside was unmuffled very suddenly as Miss Plum shouldered her way in.

"Victor!" she said in surprise as she spotted him at the back of the room. "What're you still doing in here? It's all picking up."

"Just making a few – a few last-minute adjustments," he explained, fiddling with the cuff that Black Widow had just fixed up. "I'll be right out."

"Best be, love," she said, and from the table picked up a large platter of housefly hors d'oeuvres, some with wings still twitching. "We're missing you out here." He gave her a smile as she left, and turned back to the dusty little mirror.

"Those did look tasty," the spider said, licking her little lips. "I suppose I'll manage to sneak a few for myself. Shall I see you soon?"

"Yes, just a minute," he said, and she rose up away from him on a silk rope. The kitchen seemed a very big place when one was alone in it. He looked deader than usual tonight, and as hollow as an old pumpkin. He stared at his reflection in disappointment for a moment before a loud cheer began to rise from the crowd outside the door, and he decided he could put it off no longer. He brushed back his hair one last time as he left the room.

Dottie had done a fine job. Victor may have known little about parties, but he could recognize a well put-together one when he saw it. Sparkling streamers were hung from every rafter and high point, lending the room an unearthly shine, and all the tables had been decked out in resplendent black cloth. The dance floor had been cleared, and around it were gathered what must have been close to a hundred residents of the Land of the Dead, out after a long and dark night and all very glad to socialize again. Most were in their finest funeral attire. It was every bit the deathday party a better man would have hoped for – an underworld gathering of the very brightest sort.

"Victor!" said a familiarly stuffy voice at his side. He turned to see Mayhew by the banquet table, gesturing lightly with a smile. "Been a while, eh?"

It had been a while, indeed; to his memory the erstwhile driver hadn't been missing his nose the last time they'd talked. His face looked incomplete without it. "Good to see you." Victor returned the greeting and offered a handshake.

"Nice timing for a party," Mayhew said lightly, leaning against the table with a little popping of joints. "It's been a long night, hasn't it?"

"Do you think so?"

As they spoke, Bonejangles sauntered up to lay his arms around both their shoulders. "Evenin', gentlemen," he grumbled. He'd clearly neither cleaned nor sobered up for the party, but the little black bowtie around his neck vertebrate was a nice touch. "Fine one, innit?"

"Will you be providin' out musical accompaniment for the evenin'?" Mayhew asked.

"Me and the boys," the skeleton said with a little bow. "Music, in perpetuity. 'S what I'm here for. Here, now…" A commotion was taking place near the pub stairs, where several women were descending. Dottie and her small entourage were dressed in all the most garish colors of the rainbow, and couldn't have looked more pleased for it. The crowd parted for them as they entered the floor.

"Thanks to all for joining us on this lovely evening," she said magnanimously, and a smattering of clapping went up. A final form was moving down the staircase behind her. "If you would welcome tonight's guest of honor _and_ resident birthday girl – Miss Helene!"

Helene stepped down from the stairs fully before their eyes, and Victor nearly couldn't believe his. She looked nothing like the frumpy child he'd seen less than an hour before; her cheeks were rosy and her skirts full and wide, like something from a fairy tale. He felt an immediate discontent. The color was lovely on her, he knew… but it was still so _red_. And to say it had a plunging neckline would have been an understatement; he wasn't sure one could have a neckline at all without sleeves.

While more gentlemanly men approached to kiss her hand, Bonejangles hung behind to chuckle. "Did I tell you you did good?" he asked Victor, ribbing him lightly. "'Cause you did good."

"Should she be wearing that?" he asked, dashing his eyes between her dress and those of other women. "I don't think she should be wearing that."

"It's a fancy look, I think," Mayhew said diplomatically.

"Yeah, that's what we'll call it," Bonejangles said, and gave Victor a hearty slap on the back when he looked over at him aghast. "Ah, relax. It's a party, and we're dead, not old." Victor was not reassured. The skeleton approached the stage to prepare for music-making and Mayhew left to fetch a drink, leaving Victor standing by the kitchen entrance with the feeling of being utterly unsure as to how to proceed. He walked up to her finally as the others had begun to thin out; the lights were dimming slightly, Miss Plum's servers were wandering about the crowd with platters, and the band – perhaps an orchestra now, with the addition of the cello – was beginning to strum up.

Helene was talking still to one of the regular bar patrons, a man younger than Victor, who'd been murdered, if he recalled correctly. "Do you like the banner?" he heard him ask her, gesturing to the one over the makeshift ballroom floor: _HAPPY DEATHDAY VICTOR! ! WELCOME DAUGHTER. _"They almost had it say 'niece,' but I got to them in time."

"Much obliged," she said with a smile, and they both turned toward Victor as he advanced. Helene had a healthy flush about her cheeks that bespoke of deep satisfaction. He wasn't sure why, but he didn't like it. "Oh! Hello…" She didn't finish the greeting, because it was clear that after it all, she still wasn't quite sure how to address him. Hurriedly she said, "You've met Henry, I'm sure?" The young man proffered a hand to shake, which Victor took distrustfully.

"Yes, we know one another," he said, perhaps a bit more gruffly than he'd intended. The boy looked a little taken aback. Victor was sorry, but not all that sorry. "Are you cold?" he asked Helene, turning his attention again quickly. She raised her eyebrows. "You look cold. Take my jacket."

"No," she said as he started to shoulder out of his coat, crossing her arm across her chest defiantly. "I'm quite fine." Her look was pointed and his was frustrated; their frowns must have matched each other's perfectly. She said to him under her breath, "It's not so different from what the dead ladies are wearing."

"You may wear it when you're dead, then," he was about to say, but she shifted her attention as Bonejangles approached them, standing much straighter than he had before and with clear intent to focus. He made a beeline for Helene; Victor kept a very close watch on the direction of his eyeball.

"Don't think we've been properly introduced," he said, taking Helene's hand and pressing it to his jawbone. "Call me Bonejangles. I make the music."

"Oh! Good to meet you," she said. "Is that your real name?"

"My real name's not nearly as pretty," he cackled.

"It couldn't be." She tilted her head. "I suppose I owe you an apology for pulling your arm off earlier."

"Pay me back with a dance later," he drawled. If he'd had skin anymore he'd certainly have been winking. Victor stiffened, but Helene smiled. "And yer name, again?"

"Helene Winnifred Chastity Philomena Van Dort," she said, clasping her hands in front of her skirt expectantly. Her wrist fell into a spot of light, and the red beads around it glittered richly.

"'S enough names for two people," said the skeleton, tipping his bowler.

"Yes. Well." She was back to flushing a little. "When I was born my grandparents all had different ideas for what to name me and I ended up with all of them."

That explained a lot, actually. As Bonejangles bid her a temporary goodbye, though, Victor was consumed with not only a feeling of authoritarian impotence, but of once again having something right on the edge of his mind, as had become so common in the last few hours. He and Victoria had been going to name their daughter something else. He just couldn't remember what.

The whispering in the pub went down as the violin went up. Helene's eyes were wide as a skeleton wearing a stiff collar and nothing else approached the front of the stage with a violin and began a long tremble that drifted across the crowd, where several ladies sighed in admiration. The concerto wasn't one Victor had heard before, but it did have a strikingly familiar quality. Perhaps it was just that of sadness. So enraptured were they by the movements onstage that none of the three noticed Dottie approach. She slipped neatly between Helene and Henry and wrapped her arms around the waists of the former and her father, to which they reacted in simultaneous, muffled surprise.

"Ohh, it's wonderful, isn't it?" she whispered, holding both close. "I was so happy to get Gregor to do the violin for us. Jangly calls proper music "stuffy," can you believe that? The brute." Onstage, Bonejangles did look rather bored. He was at least missing a bit of his usual flair. "I do hope you two will have the opening father-daughter dance when they start up the waltz, won't you?"

Helene seemed to pull away a little and Victor whispered back, "I don't think I can."

"Balderdash," Dottie said with pointed politeness. "It's your ball. Of course you can dance." She squeezed them tightly and then swept off again, buffing Henry behind them with a mouthful of feathers. Helene watched her go with the confidence seeming to melt off her face.

"It's not really our ball," she whispered uncertainly.

"Sure it is," Henry responded, pointing above their heads. "They put you on the banner." The boy didn't seem to have too strong a sense of when to speak and when to say silent, but he did notice her facial expression, and finally conceded, "Well, I suppose I'll meet you on the ballroom floor, then? Good to see you again." He backed away carefully.

Victor waited briefly as he disappeared into the crowd. "A friend?" he asked.

"Oh, we're not -" Helene was about to protest, but stopped to consider. "I suppose we might be friends," she said quietly, sounding surprised at the idea. Then she looked a bit worried. "I don't usually enjoy dancing," she said.

"Neither do I," Victor said, looking over at the girl. She returned the look, but perhaps the mirrored worry on his face eased her fear a little, because she glanced quickly away again with a small smile, and the sense of camaraderie that bloomed from it was as warm as a candle.

"You… you could smile more," Victor suggested as Gregor ended his movement onstage to an appreciative clap, and backed away so that the other strings might start up something a bit more festive. He wouldn't normally have made such a thing his business, but wasn't it part of being someone's father that one should have the right to speak their mind on such matters? His acknowledgement of her expression killed it immediately as she looked up with a frown. "I-I mean, you _should_ smile more," he insisted, and stood up straight at the tapping of the conductor's wand. "I think it suits you."

She bit her lip as the crowd parted from the two of them, a wide path leading to the center of the floor. They walked side-by-side to the center of the room where they stopped and hesitated before moving into position. She barely came up to his shoulder and had to reach quite far to place her hand there, while he was somewhat unhappy with the position of his own hand on her waist, but there was nothing to be done for it. "One, two, three," the bandmaster counted, and Victor scarcely had time to worry whether he still remembered how to waltz before the music started up and sent them off in a whirl of sound. The two of them turned on the floor and he was frankly relieved to find his feet making all necessary movements with minimal input from his head. The deep red skirt swirled in the air around them and Helene looked in wonderment over her arm at the room around. He tried to smile at her, but it might have come out as more of a grimace. All the light and color twirled around the two of them as they turned on the floor – nothing too complicated or too ungainly, just a simple three-step that pushed them to the edges of the crowd with the swelling strings and then back again.

Out of the corner of his eye, Victor thought he saw Dottie May dabbing gently at her eyes, but his vision was obfuscated by a second couple entering the dance floor, much more showily than Victor could have managed. By twos and threes the couples stepped up with each new measure, until the floor was filled with full skirts and coattails of a dozen hues while the music in the air swelled more colorful still. The sweeping violins bore down across their heads like the wind. One-two-three, one-two-three. This wasn't so hard at all.

He was finally falling into the rhythm of it with intention when a hand tapped him on the shoulder, and they slowed to a stop. A tall mustachioed skeleton bowed to Helene as she turned his way, and proffered a hand. "May I?" he asked.

Helene looked Victor's way to see him standing rather dumbly, and then smiled and offered her hand to the gentleman in return. Despite her reservations, she looked quite happy at being asked to dance again. Victor found himself alone again for only a second before one of Dottie's entourage, a blonde-haired woman named Greta, took him up with a smile.

"Dottie wanted you to know that was picture-perfect," she said as they caught back in step. The floor was becoming very full. "This is everything she's ever wanted, dear thing."

"Oh. I can imagine," he said, somewhat vindicated for having it confirmed that this entire affair hadn't ever been about him at all. Still, this was turning out much nicer than he'd expected. Everything felt like a proper scene from a storybook, with gentlemen and ladies in their finest and the food and music rich, and he was a part of it – at the center of it, even. He'd never known anything of the sort before.

Dottie herself was dancing happily nearby with a man with a wooden leg, but broke away as she saw Victor. "Victor-kins!" she cried, and tugged his arms away from her friend, who seemed unperturbed and moved on immediately to a blackened chimneysweep. "Oh, this is all so perfect. I never could have dreamed!" She pulled him around enthusiastically and he stumbled behind, any semblance of rhythm lost. "I am ever so glad you died today. What a wonderful night," she sighed. "What a wonderful dance." And she too broke away, twirling off into the arms of a soldier with a missing jawbone.

Victor stayed as she left, and found himself standing alone again. The crowd was thick, and with the break in his movement and a lack of a partner, he decided that he wasn't much inclined to take up again. He moved slowly away from the floor and settled near the wall, watching the crowd in all its exuberant color. Helene's head could not be seen above the throng, but her bright red skirt flashed in and out every few seconds in a new position.

"Hors d'oeuvres?" asked a dull voice at his elbow. A slumped man with a gunshot wound festering around his shoulder held up the tray of skewered houseflies. Victor took one out of respect for Miss Plum's cooking, but had little appetite. The party from this vantage was resplendent in blue skin and white bone; it could have been said to have an infernal look to it, but that only added to the crooked charm. He stood by the stairs, torn between his status as guest of honor and his desire not to be at the center of attention.

"Are you going to eat that?" asked a tremulous little voice by his ear, and he looked over to find Black Widow hanging by a thread from the rafters. He handed her the little bug and she began wrapping it quickly. "For later," she said sweetly, and tucked it away in a crack in the wall. "Are you done with the party already?"

"I danced," he said.

"I saw," she said. "It was a sweet thing. She's a lovely girl."

"I still can't really believe I had anything to do with that," he said. The red skirt was still brushing in and out of cracks in the crowd.

"You look to me like you've got more in common than you realize," she said, alighting upon his shoulder. "And you're both not nearly as bad at dancing as you think. Would you join me?"

"Pardon?" he asked.

"I've always wanted to dance," she said dreamily. "Somehow I've had difficulty finding a partner, can you imagine?"

Victor held his arm out to the side as the little widow crawled to his elbow and sat expectantly; he supposed one more dance wouldn't hurt. The first waltz had ended and a second, more dramatic and strident one was pushing into full swing when he stepped back out onto the floor, which was shrinking and expanding with the movements of the dancers. He felt out of place with his nearly-invisible partner, but no one leered, and in fact several women gave the spider admiring waves, which she responded to graciously. A pattern of rings had formed in the dancing on the floor, rotating to and fro on the one-two-three, like fifty flowers opening every second, and to be in the middle of it felt rather like standing at the very center of the spinning world. The Black Widow couldn't have looked happier, and swayed on his arm as they moved.

Helene was at the center, taken up with the young man called Henry again. She wasn't a bad dancer, not like Victor was. They both were smiling; perhaps she'd decided to take his advice to do it more often, but more likely she was just enjoying herself too much to be self-conscious anymore. Victor found himself smiling a little as well. A day ago he couldn't have possibly remembered what it was like to feel so happy. The air smelled sweeter for the song and laughter in it. Even the dress wasn't irritating him so badly anymore.

Bonejangles abdicated his position onstage to leap down onto the ballroom floor with his violin, and approached Helene with a flourish. She pulled away from Henry and the skeleton took up the violin again, beginning a dance with the girl without touching. She looked startled at first, but slowly caught on. They stepped around each other at two feet's distance, moving far more than the center of the floor ought to, and breaking through the rings. They moved with the strident beat and the crowd followed along, laughing and clamoring at the break in routine. The entire swell of the gathering was shifting toward the exit, and indeed someone threw open the doors then and the entire group spilled out into the square, turning together with clasped hands.

First there was only Bonejangles' violin to keep the three-step, but soon came the violist and trombonist, and the cellist behind, puffing faintly before setting up at the base of Blackbowels' horse. The music that had been contained in the pub echoed off of the buildings here in a grand manner, amplifying every sweeping note into a triumphant statement against the quiet of the grave. Victor turned in the center of the square, where out were marching half a dozen corpses with lanterns on poles, lifted high above their heads to push the dark away. Shambling bodies turned with grace, rotting hands clasped in rotting hands, and all of it out in the night air filled with song and light. Helene was still at the very middle, hand-to-hand now with a man in an admiral's uniform, her face full of wonder to mirror that of Emily's in a time long past, a time she'd spent dancing in the moonlight for the sheer joy of being in a new and marvelous place.

Emily.

He remembered now. Of course that was her name. And that would have been his daughter's name too. He drew still and Black Widow leapt gracefully from his arm as it dropped to his side. He remembered the sight of the little girl in her bassinet the night he'd died, sixteen years ago. She'd been the very picture of her mother's beauty even then, and for him to have ever forgotten the sight of it seemed a travesty. She'd been going to be their little Emily, sweet and bubbly and full of light. Maybe that wasn't exactly how things had turned out, but thinking back, he realized he wouldn't have had it any other way. She wasn't Emily, after all, and she wasn't Victoria either. She was Helene, his daughter, and looking across the square to her little spot in the light, just to think it made him the proudest man he'd ever been.

Victor stepped slowly away from the crowd toward the nearest alley entrance as the music began to rise toward its conclusion. This wasn't really his party in any respect, and perhaps it hadn't been intended as hers either, but it was now. People loved her, and they were right to. He stood lightly against the shadows, but without a feeling of being out of place. He'd had his time. To duck out now seemed the right thing. He looked down slightly and took a little breath. It really was strange, that he still did that.

A small clatter sounded in the alleyway behind him; he turned curiously to see a small shape moving in silhouette against the half-lit street. Expecting the perpetrator to be a drunkard refugee from the party, he stepped closer.

"Hell- hello?" he asked. "Is everything alright?" A second bump sounded. He took another step forward into the shadows and was startled by the sudden scratching on a wooden crate at his right arm. He looked down and had to squint to identify the creature sitting atop it. It was so large that he thought at first it was a cat. It took a second for his eyes to adjust enough to see the long slim tail trailing over the wood.

A rat. And as it looked up to meet his eyes, a hundred more suddenly opened in the shadows, glimmering like tiny wet beads.

At the exact moment that he realized this had happened before, they swarmed him, rushing from the darkness to cling to his trousers and leap into his hair, chattering evilly and scratching his flesh as deeply as they could. He stumbled backwards into the wall, pinned down by the thronging animals, and turned his head desperately to the side. He could still see the crowd through the alley entrance, not thirty feet away. If he could call out they just might –

"I wouldn't if I were you," whispered a low deep voice in his ear, slimy and freezingly familiar. Even after sixteen years, Victor turned back without even the smallest uncertainty as to who it was.

"You," he said, struggling to stand.

"Me," said the figure at his side with no small delight, and in a second more they all were swept away into the darkness while the waltz in the square drew to a shimmering close.

* * *

><p><strong>This chapter is dedicated to <em>Downton Abbey.<em>Where I once thought of the social escapades of rich Europeans as out-of-touch and inconsequential, I am now officially a convert. I know that a valet does more than just park cars; I've started standing up whenever anyone enters the room; I want to follow Maggie Smith around all day just to watch her be catty. Starting next chapter, this fic will be dedicated 40% to discussion of who the rightful heir to Everglot Manor is, and 60% to humor based in gentle breaches of etiquette.  
><strong>


	11. Spectacular

11

Helene was sure that her face would split from smiling. At the end of her last dance she had a sheen of sweat over her nose and her right arm was tired to death from being held upright, but she couldn't remember she last time she'd been this sort of happy. The string quartet next began a little sonata, and as the crowd dispersed around the square to talk and drink, she too pulled away to the side, positively flush. Corpses tipped their hats to her from across the area, and she surprised herself over and over by curtseying in response. She'd never made a willful curtsey before in her life.

"Sweetie!" cried the dead woman named Dottie, stumbling up with a gin in one hand and Bonejangles' arm in the other. "Oh, _darling."_ She dropped the arm to give the girl a weepy hug, and it clattered on the ground before its owner loped up to retrieve it, looking only mildly inconvenienced. "This has been b-beautiful," Dottie sobbed, her heavy makeup beginning to smear. "You can't know how much… how much th-this…" She hiccupped and pulled away with a hand over her mouth. Bonejangles looked on impassively.

"It's been lovely, really," Helene said, taking the dead woman's hands. Hours ago she wouldn't have imagined making such a personal gesture toward anyone, much less a corpse. It felt like there must be some kind of magic in the air here. "Both of you. I can't remember enjoying myself so much."

"Damn right," said the skeleton, tilting his eyeball into the other socket. "No one throws a party like me n' the boys."

"Ohh, hush, now, it was hardly all you," Dottie fussed, brushing at him. He ambled away with a shrug and she looked back to Helene, still whisking at her eyes. "How long will you stay, darling? There are ever so many gowns I could put you in."

"Actually…" Helene wrung her hands a bit, wishing that she could have relayed the information secondhand. "I don't think I can stay much longer at all. Really, this time." It must have been near to two o'clock in the morning. "I won't be allowed outside until Christmas if they notice I've gone."

The woman sighed dramatically with a hand over her heart, but said, "I understand, dear thing. And it's a good thing to know you'd be so missed." She fluffed her feather boa and tried to straighten up. "I hope we will see you again next year, at least."

The thought hadn't even occurred to her. "I'd love to," she said, and in her mind's eye saw herself at the center of a ballroom floor again – in purple this time, perhaps, purple trimmed in gold. But she pushed the thought away, remembering that she wasn't the sort of girl to fantasize about dresses. As Dottie turned away, she asked her, "Have you seen my father?"

"I'm sorry, dear?" the woman said. "Not in a while, I'm afraid." Helene frowned as she was left alone, but decided not to let it bother her. Surely, he'd show up again before the hour was out.

Now, though a part of her never wanted to leave, she knew it was time to go home again, and in thinking things through she decided that she had no desire to make a production of it. Let the evening end on a good and peaceful note; in all likelihood they'd never notice her gone. She walked slowly around the back of the pub in her ball gown and climbed the stairs there one at a time, determined not to muss the dress any more than necessary. The steps rose up and up onto the rooftops, where an entire small city of its own seemed to have once been built, full of tiny bridges between close buildings and doorways into bright little rooms, still lit well into the middle of the night. As she was crossing a small path between the pub's rooftop and its neighbor's, she stopped and turned her head up to the dark sky, with its sheer coat of green light, and promised herself that this wasn't the end. Nothing ended in the Land of the Dead.

There was always next year.

She turned the handle to Dottie's room when she reached it and thought immediately that she'd somehow managed to break something, because from within came a distinct crash and the sound of tearing cloth. Startled, she pushed the door open in entirety and looked about. One of the lamps along the wall was smoking dark and the room had the look of having been lightly shaken, but it was nothing terribly out of place from the bright pink chaos of the last time she'd seen it.

As she stepped inside there sounded a scuttling in the corner, so faint it might have been imagined. She turned to all quarters of the room, but saw nothing. A strange little something was gnawing at her, but she couldn't imagine what could be making her feel so wrong. Strange things just happened on Hallowe'en. Everybody said so.

She stepped into the boudoir to find her clothes still in a heap near the window where they'd been thrown. Simultaneously, she realized that she'd also brought no one up to help her undress, and sighed as she gathered up her shirtwaist, before taking pause.

In the pile beneath the waist lay an envelope. It wasn't large, nor was it sealed, and she might have been mistaken, but the corners looked a bit chewed. She reached down slowly to ease the paper open and draw out the letter within. It was written with a flourish on the fine stationery:

_Darling,_

_I've prepared a surprise for the end of this evening. Join me in the woods west of town, at the amusements. You'll know the place when you see it. Come alone, it is for you only._

_Victor_

As Helene read the short note, twice and then a third time, every trace of her good sentiment from the evening vanished. Something seemed off, but she didn't have the words to say why. She stood up slowly, twisting a lock of hair around her finger. She had read enough of the penny dreadfuls to take careful note of mysterious letters, and her father didn't seem the type to enter a lady's private boudoir just to deliver one. So what was this strangeness?

_Join me in the woods west of town._

This was not right.

She clutched the paper in her hand until it had creased five ways with her fingers. Her heart was beginning to pound with a nervous flutter. What would Mrs. Hall have done? She took her frock coat from the pile and wrapped it around her shoulders, stuffing the note into its pocket and exiting the room again. It was difficult not to trip on her skirt on the way down the stairs, but she was much less concerned now with the state of the gown than she had been going up. Every moment she spent in the dark of the alley before emerging into the square felt like a moment spent with a knife at her back. Many partygoers had retreated back inside with the string quartet, it seemed, but she called out, "Has anyone seen my father?"

Several looked up. "My father," she insisted, turning to a few ladies near the skeletal horse and then around again to a trio of soldiers who'd been sharing a toast. "Victor. Victor Van Dort. Have you seen him?" She was hoping badly that everything would be revealed as a poor joke when he turned up, wondering what all the fuss could be, but the more she asked the less anybody seemed to know.

"Saw him during the waltz," said one man, unhelpfully, because that was the last time she'd seen him as well. She should have kept a better eye out. If fathers couldn't be trusted not to disappear under mysterious circumstances then clearly the responsibility would be on her shoulders in the future.

Inside the pub was no better. The music had caught back up into a swinging baroque piece now, and many patrons had returned to dancing. She could hardly be heard at all. "My father," she tried to insist, over and over, but no one seemed to have anything to say other than to note an admiration for her waltz. Bonejangles was onstage and Dottie was nowhere to be seen. Helene turned desperately in the crowd. "My father!" she called, to anyone who might listen. "Please! He's very tall, have you seen him?"

She turned again, straight into someone's side. "Henry!" she gasped as she looked up, nearly poking her eye out on his enormous nose. He looked as surprised as she was.

"Miss Van Dort!" he said, offering an arm. "Would you like to dance again?"

"Not now," she said desperately, and took his elbow only to pull him toward the door. When they'd reached the corner, she pulled out the letter and nearly crushed it in her shaking hands. "Read this," she said, wrapping herself tightly in her arms. "Please, have you seen my father? Anywhere?"

Henry read the note with a look of bemusement. "It sounds like he's in the woods," he said, as if worried she might be a little slow.

She snatched the paper back, working very hard to not snap. "This doesn't sound like him," she insisted, spreading it out smoothly again against the brick wall and reading it herself once more. _Darling?_ It was too cloying. She couldn't imagine Victor saying any such word, much less to her, but there was another voice in her head from which it seemed to flow easily, slimy and deep. The very thought of it felt like a slug's thin trail inside her ears. "I don't think he wrote it." She looked back up at Henry. "I'm worried something's gone wrong. Will you come with me?"

"Me?" he asked, apparently flabbergasted that anyone would want him around.

She said, "Please." It was a little harder than she'd anticipated, but she was determined not to become weepy. "I think something's happened to him. I don't want to go alone."

Henry looked down at her with a sympathetic expression for a second before saying, "'Course I'll come. If you need me."

Helene cracked back into a smile for a second before realizing that it was an open pathway for tears, and shook her head quickly to clear up. "Thank you," she sniffed, composure as tight as she could make it. She took his hand and pulled him out of the pub into the night. She might have been mistaken, but it almost felt like a breeze was picking up. That didn't seem right for the underworld. The very air felt wrong.

Henry took careful steps to keep pace with her as she marched onward. "You're calling him your father, now," he said. "Does this mean you've worked all through the what-it-was earlier?"

She shot him an irritated glance and sped up as quickly as she could in the skirt, but he still looked earnest. What a time for this. "I knew you could," he said happily.

"Oh hush," she said, and set her eyes set stubbornly toward the dark western hills.

* * *

><p>The possibility that her worry might actually be about to ruin a wonderful surprise occurred to Helene as they passed the first line of trees on the path out of town, an unmaintained road overgrown with dead shrubs. She didn't truly believe it, but the nagging prospect remained. The high spindly tree trunks stretched far above them like crows' claws in the sky, and the ground was swaddled in a thick blue mist. Helene found something very disturbing about not being able to see her own feet. Henry seemed equally aware the strange atmosphere; where he had still seemed fairly lighthearted in town, he was quiet now, and noticeably somber.<p>

"He's really in here?" he asked nervously, stepping carefully around a trailing root on the path.

"Someone's in here," she said grimly, following his hop-and-a-skip. "You've really never heard of this place? 'The amusements?'"

"Never," he assured her. "I didn't know there was anything out here at all, but trees." Helene started chewing on the inside of her lip, as she'd been doing a lot of this night. It was starting to go a bit raw.

The further they walked, the darker it got, though there was no foliage to block the thin light of the sky. Rather, the air itself seemed sooty, and ready to swallow them up if they strayed too deep. "Did you hear that?" Henry asked suddenly. She turned around and the crunching of their feet on the ground ceased.

"I don't hear anything," she said after a moment.

"There was something," he said nervously. They took pause, but nothing sounded.

"We should go," she started to say, but Henry hissed suddenly, _"Sshh!"_

From around a tree was cornering a small shape in the fog, bristly and hunched, like a tiny bear. Helene was caught aghast for a moment before she realized that the figure wasn't an unfamiliar sight at all. "Cat?" she asked quietly.

"Brrwr," came the response from the thing by the tree, and it stepped proudly out of the gloom with its head held high.

Helene dropped to her knees in the mist and the fat tom jumped into her lap. "Oh, Cat!" she cried, wrapping him up in her arms and kissing the top of his head, while he purred. His body had been cold for a while now, and his fur was still crunchy with blood. She bit her lip and whispered, "Oh, I'm so sorry. Poor, poor cat."

While she cuddled him on the ground, Henry looked on. "Your cat?" he asked.

"Not really anybody's cat," she said gently, scratching beneath his chin. "But a very good one nonetheless." Henry bent down to give him a pat, which the tom turned into a rub down the spine by pushing against his hand.

"You're a big fellow," he said, to which the cat made a small noise that sounded like an affirmation.

Helene sniffed a little and kissed him again before standing up. "You really don't have to come along this time," she said gently. "I think you've earned it."

"Mawwr," said the cat. Helene smiled.

"Then you wouldn't know the way to a place called 'the amusements,' would you?"

The cat blinked at her, big-eyed, before hunching and flattening its ears against its head. "Sss," it said, like a warning, and Helene felt her heart sank as she realized that the reaction was a fair justification for her worries.

"I'm sorry," she said, "but I have to." The cat gave her a very long look before sitting up and marching off with its stumpy tail held high. It traveled a few yards before stopping and looking back, clearly waiting for them to move.

"Oh, thank you," Helene said, rushing forward to follow and pulling Henry along with her.

"Prrf," said the cat, and she was quite sure that if cats could roll their eyes, this one would have.

He led them slightly southward from their path, through a deep thicket of trees with high roots and tight trunks. Helene had trouble squeezing through at places in her voluminous skirt; she really ought to have taken the time to change. The going was slow, and the path was long and much better-suited for a cat-sized traveler than a human-sized one. The first sign of what had been called 'the amusements' would have been nearly unnoticeable if Henry hadn't managed to trip over it. While he was climbing back to his feet, Helene crouched down to the small, snapped signpost on the ground. It had no words on it, but a painting of a skeleton pointing to its right. A shiver dropped down her spine. After a night carousing with the dead, she wouldn't have thought the sight of another one could bother her, but something about the little picture was disturbing. The skull didn't have the look of a true eye socket to it; it was too black, and much too deep, and the smile was too wide with too many teeth. She stood up again slowly.

Up ahead, the cat had come to a stop again between two trees. It was not looking back at them, but upward. Helene pushed past the last low branch and stepped up to where the fat tom was sitting, and her jaw dropped.

"What is it?" Henry whispered, stumbling forward himself. When he caught sight of it himself his arms fell straight down to his sides. "Oh my…"

The three of them stood at the edge of a small clearing in the trees. The ground was bare dirt with some dry moss here and there, and not a scrap of vegetation more, either dead or alive. Everything beneath the treetops was nearly too dark to see, but into the sky above them rose the black thin skeleton of the largest Ferris wheel Helene had ever seen in her life. Its base was obscured by the pines to the south, but it must have risen above them two hundred feet or more, set in silhouette against the purple-green sky above. Its cars sat still and quiet, but from somewhere, she thought she could hear something creaking. As she raised her hand to brush a lock of hair out of her face, she realized she was shaking violently.

"Where did it come from?" Henry whispered. She gave him a sidelong glance. "No, really," he said, meeting her gaze with a very worried look. "I've never heard of anyone being out here to make such a thing. Never. Not in stories, not…" He gulped, but there was no use waiting about. Helene wanted badly to be gone as soon as possible. She stepped out, still trembling like a leaf, and the creaking immediately stopped. The clearing, she saw now, seemed to twist off to the right like a snake through the forest, and so she began to follow it. Henry broke out of the trees to follow her and skipped quickly forward to stay by her side. "It's alright," he said, without prompt. "We'll figure this out. It'll be alright." He didn't sound quite convincing, but Helene appreciated the sentiment.

They went around the curve of the clearing and before them saw the second structure of the amusements. The edge of an enormous tent was pushing from between the trees, striped canvas barely clinging to its metal bones. Through the branches along the path were strung lanterns on a wire, as dark and dead as severed heads. A painted archway stretched between the trees, on which only the word "SPECTACLE" was still readable. Helene's feeling of dread was nearly palpable between her fingers.

_"…pretty girl…"_

She felt the blood in her body freeze as a whisper from the trees touched her ears. She grabbed Henry's wrist, and they both stared out blindly into the deep of the trees.

"Hello?" Helene asked, so bare it was almost a whisper.

"Well, _hello," _came a woman's voice in response, from where out of the darkness were forming moving shapes. It was a dead man and woman, dressed in ragged finery that caught on the stickley branches around them as they walked. They were both smiling, as skeletons do, but their movements were odd, jerky and jilting, dragging their feet like drunkards. Helene looked to Henry.

"I don't know," he said to her, though she'd asked nothing. "I don't know…" He gulped and stepped in front of Helene protectively. "S-sir?" he called to the approaching shapes. "Ma'am? We're looking for someone. You wouldn't happen to…?"

"Do we?" drawled the woman at the tree line, turning her head to her fellow. Her skull flopped off to the side like a doll's. "Do we know?"

"Do we ever, m'dear," said the man, his voice a thick brogue. "Lookin' fer someone? All the time, we are."

"Could we only remember who 'e was," sighed the woman. "And what a help these two coulda been. Too bad, too bad…"

The both of them were stumbling out of the darkness, arms limp, heads lolling. Henry pressed Helene backward further as she squeezed his bad hand tightly.

"Victor Van Dort," he tried again. "Have you seen him?"

"Ha' we seen, dearest?" asked the man, swiveling his torso to the side sickly. "Ha' we seen at all?"

"Not in much too long," she responded, throwing her head back so her hat flopped clean off. "Oh, but if we did, darling, you'd be the first to know. What celebration to be had!" Within her black eye sockets, something seemed to be moving.

"They're mad," Helene whispered, pulling Henry down the path. "We should go, we -"

"Oh, but don't leave us, please!" cried the lady with sudden focus, stumbling forward tippily like a badly-directed puppet. Helene didn't hesitate a second to yank Henry's arm again, their backs nearly against the trees on the far side of the path now. "Oh, you can't know what it's like alone, in the dark, with their little hands, all the time."

"Relentless, like," said the man, spasming at the shoulder. His suit looked to be bulging near the collar.

"We'd help, love," the woman said, and as she spoke fell over onto her side, with no effort to catch herself. Her upper body lifted itself from the ground before collapsing again. "We'd love, help. Can't know what it's like. Little hands." Something like a worm was snaking from her eye socket. A dozen shapes were squirming under her skirt. The man tripped over to help her and wound up hopping the way on one foot like a marionette. His jawbone wagged, but nothing came out of it.

"Henry," Helene cried, pulling him with as much force as she could.

The woman grumbled, "Too much," her voice like a cracked record.

The man opened and closed his jaw once more, managed the word, "Spectacular -" and then from his mouth and sleeves tumbled a dozen rats, squealing like rusty gates. Helene clapped a hand to her mouth as they poured from beneath the woman's skirt, the man's hat.

"'Orrible, ain't it?" said a voice at Helene's ear, where another corpse had come up behind them, hands stretched outward like a crucified man. He had one eye yellow, and one marbled white. "Damn shame, damn shame. Do 'ope nothin' like that would ever happen to a nice girl like you."

Helene hadn't the voice to scream; she simply held on to Henry's hand, and ran. As they fled down the path, the lanterns in the trees burst suddenly into sickly green and blue light, and more corpses manifested from the shadows, uniformly contorted with bulging black eyes peeking out of their joints. Far ahead, a glow had risen, and the cars on the Ferris wheel ahead were beginning to brighten one-by-one. They passed under the "SPECTACLE" arch and stumbled to a halt in the clearing with a crash of noise and a flash. A ghastly circus was opening its doors just for them.

The trees were pushed back by wooden borders of ugly, painted wood, against which sat what looked like the ghosts of true amusements. The rabbit-shoot, the test of strength, and the ring-toss were all there, but as shells of those Helene knew from Upstairs, these ones painted black and red and splintered and scratched. From out of the shadows bounded a jerking corpse in the ringleader's outfit; "And guests!" he roared as he swung around them, dangling by his own shoulder blades along the ground, his feet barely grazing and a dozen rat-tails wrapped around the brim of his hat. "A pretty couple for the greatest spectacle under the earth!" A chittering went up beneath his words, and Helene, backed madly against the wooden wall, made a dash beneath his arm. She tripped, and immediately upon hitting the ground tens of rats manifested out of the darkness around her knees and wrists, squirming around her fingers and tearing at her dress. She screamed.

Henry cried, "Miss Van Dort!"

She was nearly blinded with trying to push the rodents away from her as the young man dashed by, snatching her arm and pulling her to her feet. A spotlight went up above their heads; from the slung trapezes hung three men with nooses around their necks. "Spectacular," they groaned as the two passed beneath them.

They ran, stumbling, deeper into the bright fray. Rats were crawling up lantern poles, following them uniformly with their eyes. Tiny voices squealed at them as they ducked beneath a flapping flag. The troupe of corpses called from behind, "Do stay for the spectacle!" and Helene felt nearly mad with fear of the little pale rodent hands pushing them onward.

They took a sharp turn on the lantern-lit path, and found the side of an enormous tent looming before them, with stained striped canvas and a gaunt look. They stopped just for a second; the voices were drawing closer. "Go, go!" Helene thought Henry had said it, but realized with a start that it was her own lips moving. She pushed blindly against the canvas as the voices of the entertainment grew louder in her ears, and with a rush felt herself finally meet the edge as she pulled herself underneath on her hands and knees. Henry stumbled in behind and let it drop behind him, and immediately the noise was quieted. The group that had been just on their tail now sounded half a mile away. Henry and Helene sat wide-eyed in the darkness until the noise faded entirely, him quiet as the grave, her sucking in the dust-laden air hysterically, but as silently as possible.

It felt like hours before Helene dared to move again. Her hands felt numb and clumsy as she tried to brush her hair from her face; the neat bun was coming undone. It was close to too dark to see inside of the tent, but a little light leaked down through the tattered roof. It was difficult to tell just how large the area was; a hundred feet in diameter, perhaps, or maybe more, but it was suffocatingly quiet and very, very still. In the center sat a pile of wooden crates fashioned haphazardly into some sort of chair, draped in curtains and quite worn-in looking. Helene did not like the idea that someone (or thing!) might call this a home.

"Is there a door?" she whispered to Henry, dreadfully aware of how little control she had over her voice. "Can we see what's out there?" But Henry did not respond. His eyes were fixed against the opposite side of the tent, where tucked against the canvas sat what looked like a lion's cage, barely distinguishable against the black. Only a few bare strands of light were long enough to touch the bars, and between them sat a shape that looked an awful lot like…

"Hello?"

The voice was weak, but it struck her like lightning. Helene rushed forward and fell to her knees at the base of the cage. It was him! "Oh my Lord," she said, with a knot in her throat. "I can't believe we found you!" Victor sat on the floor and reached for her hands as she placed them on the iron bars.

Henry came jogging up behind. "Mister Van Dort!" he said. "Thank the Lord!"

She felt as though she could hardly breathe. "Oh, I knew it wasn't real," Helene said, beginning to blindly search with her hands for a lock or key to the cage. "I knew the note couldn't be from you, I knew it was a trap but I couldn't just go -"

"Stop. Listen to me," Victor interrupted snagging her elbow to stop her and looking very intently in the darkness. He had no thankful greeting for her and no trace of uncertainty in his voice; it was a disconcerting welcome. "You have to leave, _right now,_ and not ask any questions." She looked up in shock; his face was noticeably gaunt and his fine burial clothes were torn. More than anything else, he looked _scared_, more than any dead man should be. "Please. Don't wait to find out why. Just listen to me and go."

She was stayed by confusion. "But I came for you -"

"Forget me! He doesn't want me! Get out, before he -"

"Before I what?" asked a fourth voice from the darkness behind them.

It was so sudden that Helene felt like a heavy cold blanket had just been dropped over her shoulders, but bravely she blinked away the stars that were winking before her eyes and turned her gaze upward. The madman had arrived. He was as large as ever, his horrible face concealed by the darkness but his shape imposing as a mountain. "Y-you," she said, removing her hands from the bars of the cage so that they would not rattle and give away her fear. "Why – why have you done this?"

"Oh, darling," he said, bowing slightly. Upon his shoulder sat the biggest rat that Helene had ever seen in her life, nearly the size of a terrier. "The fact that I need you… Consider it a gesture of admiration."

She stepped backward, and he stepped forward into where the light touched the skeletal half of his face. "Hey, now," Henry said, trying to interfere, but the madman turned so suddenly that the boy was about thrown back against the cage with shock.

_"Shut up,"_ he snarled, before turning back to Helene with a snarl. "I'm fairly sure you were told come alone."

Helene's heart was in her throat, but she didn't let it stop her from shakily snapping, "You must think me extraordinarily stupid."

His face twitched slightly, but then relaxed into a slimy smile. "Oh, not at all, dear thing. I have nothing but respect for your mind and… the rest of you." She instinctively wrapped her coat tighter around her shoulders. "Which is why I needed you here today, of course. I need a favor. From an old friend."

"A… favor?"

"Don't listen to him," Victor instructed from the cage next to her. "Don't listen to a word -"

With a gesture of the madman's finger, five rats leapt from the darkness, pressing their little hands and feet against his lips and ears to muffle him.

"Don't make them do worse," said the madman with a sneer. "Yes, dearest, a favor." He swept around her toward the strange throne in the center of the area, surprisingly graceful despite his limp. She looked desperately toward her father, being smothered by fur, and Henry, looking utterly helpless as to what to do. "It's fairly simple, you see," the man at the center of the room continued. "It's been dreadfully dull, all the time spent being dead these last many years. I have spent time in _deep _introspection and decided – it's time for me to move on. Do you know how a man does that?" Helene shook her head wordlessly. "We finish the business that keeps us down here in the first place. Do you know what my business here is?" Helene shook her head again, more slowly this time.

His voice was deep and textured, and almost convincingly dramatic. "Neither did I, for many years. Until one day, finally, I saw the truth – it had been you. It was always you. The one that got away." He looked to her, his partial face like a mask, half-malevolent, half-stolid, and threw up a hand in a gesture of despair. "I realized that my dissatisfaction at our ending kept me bound to a world that wanted me no longer. To pass on… I would need you." Helene's mind was racing to make sense of his mad words. "That is why I've brought you here today, _my love._ To help me finish the story we started together. That's all I ever really wanted. A wedding, and nothing more. And then… freedom."

He began approaching her again with a purposeful, limping stride. This made no sense. She had never met this man before tonight. As he knelt in front of her and took her limp hand from her side, Victor tried to yell something from near the wall. In a flash she recalled what he had said before. _"Has anyone told you that your mother and I were both married to other… people… before we wed?"_

"Victoria," said the dead man, pressing a hand to his chest with a flourish and a sick smile on his face, "will you marry me?"

Surely this wasn't happening. Something was ringing in her ears. She thought she saw her father shaking his head from out of the corner of her eye, but was too thunderstruck to follow his movements, and the words fell from her lips without thought: "I'm not Victoria."

For a moment, the very air in the tent seemed to have been sucked away. The madman stood up slowly, and she became aware again just how much bigger than her he was. "What did you say?" he asked after a second, a very worrying undercurrent in his voice.

Still, Helene did not want to let herself be cowed. "I've – I've never met you before in my life," she said, glowering at him with matching intensity. "My name is Helene Winifred Chastity Philomena Van Dort. Victoria was my mother." She crossed her arms, feeling a victorious buzz that vanished instantly as a broad smile spread across the dead man's face.

_"Really?"_ he asked, sweeping her with his eyes, up and down, so that even beneath her coat she felt underdressed. "Oh, really, now… Is this true, Van Dort?" He looked over to Victor, speaking to him as if she had left the room. Victor still could not answer. Henry, who had been trying to edge away from the cage toward a scrap pile, froze. "Why, you should have _told_ me. Tsk. What an_ embarrassing_ miscommunication this has turned out to be." He said so, but his expression spoke of delight. He turned slowly and began wandering back to the center of the room, rubbing his chin like a wise man, still with that awful smile splitting his face. Helene had the idea that she'd made a terrible mistake.

Slowly a low laugh came drifting through the air toward them. The dead man was laughing. Not cackling or choking on a mad exultation, but chuckling rather lightly and seeming to ignore them altogether. He settled slowly in his wooden throne and the enormous rat on his shoulder crawled downward into his lap, like an ugly Persian cat.

"The offer still stands," said the madman, and Helene's throat pinched with dread. She looked back at him, splayed lazily like spoiled prince, and felt a boiling rush of hate and fear. But he had called it an offer. Did that denote a degree of optionality?

"And what happens to me if I refuse?" she asked, voice much more high-pitched than she would have liked.

"Oh, not much," he said lightly, waving a hand as if he hadn't a care in the world. "There's very little I can do to you, being alive and all." He stretched out a finger and flicked it toward the lion cage. "Him, on the other hand…"

Helene's eyes snapped back toward her father, who was being encroached on in the cage by more rats than ever, which seemed to manifest out of the shadows like bad dreams. They were crawling up his arms and legs, as he struggled to tear them away. It was a grotesque sight. Henry was nowhere to be seen. "You can't hurt him," she said, heart in her ears. "He's dead."

"Oh no?" said the madman. "You really might be surprised just how horrific it can be, watching the boys tear your body limb-from-limb." His voice was very, very low now. "And I've been looking for a good reason to have my way with that limping _butterfly _of a man for longer than you… have been alive." The thought gave him brief pause, and then he smiled again. "You'll be welcome to witness if you don't believe me."

He was sitting up again, fully, crouched in his seat like a gargoyle about to take flight. Helene's blood had been replaced with ice water and she could hardly see. Something was suddenly pounding the ground, moving toward her like the beat of a drum, but she couldn't look up quickly enough to see the source and then –

"Miss Van Dort!"

Henry came thumping out of the shadows to the left like a gangly bull, snatched her hand, and began dragging her along with him at full tilt. They bolted through the darkness toward the edge of the tent with speed to ram a carriage. He held a sharp piece of dusty wood before him like a javelin, and as they reached the canvas it split in two and spilled them out into the dim light. The din that went up as they did so was deafening. A thousand rodents sent out a shrill cry and the madman in the tent howled like an animal.

"NO!"

Henry and Helene stumbled up and out as quickly as they could, but they were being swarmed. Innumerable rats were rushing toward them from all directions, and the denizens of the circus were stumbling forward with apologies on their lips: "So sorry, sir!" "Wish I didn't have to, miss!" Rats were crawling up Helene's skirt as she struggled to shake them off, and two tippety men took Henry by the arms and began to drag him off.

"Henry!" Helene screamed, snatching for his hand before he was pulled back inside of the tent, and her nerve failed her entirely. Rats were making their ways up her clothing toward her neck, biting and scratching; they were in her hair, pushing it down over her eyes, worming their way into her petticoats. A man and a woman were coming up from behind with light requests for forgiveness. "Truly sorry, miss," the man said as he hooked his clumsy arm under hers, clothes bulging with squirming bodies. "We'll just have you up, don't struggle, let's make this easy -"

Suddenly, a most terrible noise split the air, and the horde of rats divided like a sea. Into the fray dove the fat tomcat, shrieking like a banshee with raised hackles and pinprick pupils. The big cat barreled through the swarm like a lion in a herd of gazelles, swiping left and right at every rat in reach and sending them flying. The hands holding Helene tight loosened suddenly as the rats puppeteering their poor souls scattered, pouring out of hems and collars to distance themselves from the cat. The corpses fell to their knees and Helene jumped away.

The tom was so inflated that he looked like a brown cotton puff, but this was no mood to laugh about it. Helene hit the newly-vacated ground at a run and snatched the cat up without a second thought, forcing him to drop a mangled rodent from his jaws. He dug his claws into her shoulder and she ran, as fast as she could from the flickering lights while the screams of a madman tore at her ears like horrible little pale claws

* * *

><p><strong>This seems as good a time as any to remind the reader that real-life rats are CUDDLY WIDDLE BABIES WHO ARE JUST THE SWEETEST FUZZY LOVES EVER, YES THEY ARE, YES THEY ARE! All depictions of rodents contained herein are fictionalized and do not reflect the views of the author, unless I end up writing about hamsters, where I won't mince words, because hamsters are assholes.<strong>


	12. A Vision in Scarlet

**So, those who have been paying attention may have noticed that I haven't updated anything for, uh... aboutfivemonths, BUT! I can explain! You see, this last Saturday, I was innocently at work when I was suddenly and maliciously attacked by a yellow jacket, and stung on my right index finger! The swelling has yet to go down, and I've been completely incapable of any form of writing while trying to manipulate the hideous mitt I once called my hand. So, you see, I have an excuse!**

**Aw, who am I kidding. ****I started writing this chapter in April, but then it got hard, so I gave up for a long time and spent my summer watching _Community_ and _Orange is the New Black_ and _The X-Files _and playing _Skyrim_ instead. No lies, all those things are pretty awesome, but putting four months in between chapters for a story I wanted to finish by June was weighing on me, so here I am again I guess... meaty inflexible paw of a hand or not.**

12

Helene ran until she hadn't any breath left in her body, and then kept running still. She'd lost track of the path long ago and her dress was torn to shreds, but her legs seemed to be proceeding on a mechanical wind because she couldn't stop moving, and they might well have been made of wood for all she could feel of them. When she finally fell, it was with the sense that she was about to stumble out of a terrible nightmare and into the morning, but she only came to a rest in a bed of twigs and leaves. The cat leapt from her arms as she slumped forward; he took up yowling, but she could hardly feel herself anymore. "I c-can't," she gasped, holding her ribs beneath the tight bodice. "I don't… I don't know the way…"

The tom, though, was clearly not about to let her give up after all the work he'd already put in. He started clawing at her shoulder and biting her hair, until she finally gave in and crawled back to her feet to follow his stubby brown tail through the underbrush, without a thought in her head but for a deep and grinding despair. She couldn't bring herself to think about what had happened. For now, it was too much.

So she walked. She wasn't entirely sure when the lights of the town had come bobbing back to view between the tree trunks, but as they itched at her eyes she wondered at just how ordinary it looked. The sick green light still glowed happily on, as if it cared nothing that she was having the worst night of her life. As she stumbled down the hill behind the cat, her foot caught on a trailing vine and she realized that her ankle was throbbing on the off-beat of her heart. She could hardly remember anymore what she'd done to injure it; there was an encroaching feeling that maybe she'd been in the Land of the Dead her whole life, and everything aboveground was just a dream that was slipping away. As her shoe hit the first cobbled road of the town, it jarred two tears from her chin to the ground. She hadn't realized they were there.

Helene followed the cat through the alleys with her head down, hardly cognizant of the people around her. The underworld seemed to be waking up; no longer were the windows dark and the streets empty. Corpses of all shapes, sizes, and states of decay were beginning to show. They greeted one another cheerfully.

"Nice trip topside?" she heard from within a barbershop doorway.

"Found my wife in bed with the baker," the respondent said cheerfully. "I'da scared the knickers off both of 'em, if they'd still been wearin' any!" Both burst into raucous laughter.

Ten steps onward, the cat had stopped, and Helene trod on his tail. As he hissed, she looked up and found he'd brought her back to the square with the pub on the corner and the horse on its pedestal. Men and women were gathered around with drinks in hand, while music continued to flow from the Ball and Socket door, much livelier now than the waltzes had been. She turned in place to look at the faces around, smiling and talking, and felt dreadfully alone. The tomcat, recovered from his displeasure, rubbed at her leg, and she leaned down to pick him up again. She buried her face in his fur and tried to feel comforted by his weight, but it was difficult to do so with an animal so clearly dead. He was starting to smell a bit like meat. They walked slowly across the square toward the pub together, him purring, her despondent. "Our lady of the hour!" someone called to her as she ducked through the doorway, but she hadn't the energy to respond.

Inside, the ball proper seemed to be over, or at least it had lost focus enough to have reverted back to a lively night in the pub. She sat quietly at a table with a spindly chair and the cat curled in her lap. Everything seemed to be happening inside a very thick fog. Tens of men were gathered to drink, still in their tailcoats, but Helene knew no one here. She laid her elbow on the tabletop only to have it slip immediately downward; without realizing it, she'd seated herself at an occupied table, and as she sat up the pile of books that she'd impacted went sliding off into a mess.

"Oof," said the man she'd accidentally sat with, reaching out to catch them. His left wrist had festered and rotten down to the bone. "Careful, now."

"I'm sorry," she said, knowing she sounded insincere. She was sorry, but was finding a lot of trouble expressing it properly.

"It's quite alright," he blustered, stretching out of his seat to right the stack. "Quite alright, I shouldn't have spread out so far… Oh." His eyes lit on her properly and he leaned back again. "Oh! It's you, isn't it?"

The cat was vibrating in her lap like a tiny motor. "Who?" she said dully.

"Miss Van Dort! You must be. What a coincidence. I was just talking to… Well." He cleared his throat and offered a handshake. "I can't imagine you remember me? My name's Al – uh, Alphonse. I used to be an altar boy, at the church, in…?" He pointed tentatively upward.

Helene thought she had a memory of a boy with very bright hair, long ago. "I'm sorry. I don't remember."

"Oh, well, yes, I mean, I wouldn't expect you to. I thought I should, uh, should ask." He cleared his throat. "See here, I was just going over some spellbooks at your, uh… father's request."

The mention of him was enough to fill her body with dread. "Oh?" she said tightly. It struck her that she was sitting in a pub having a perfectly ordinary conversation with a person in no peril, while her father and best friend were probably being tortured and torn to bits.

"Yes, yes, but it's no bother. I heard you needed something to get you back Upstairs? I was thinking Jacob's Ladder could do the trick… but we put it in _upside-down. _Does that sound doable?"

"Um," she said. She didn't feel like she had a stomach anymore.

"Ha ha, no, I wouldn't think so! Silly of me…" He cleared his throat and shook his sleeve back down over the rot on his arm. "Well! I hope everything's working out for you this fine evening, yes?"

It was a well-intentioned question, but Helene found herself unable to sit still any longer. Her hands clenched briefly and then she blurted, "I'm sorry, I have to go." She stood up so quickly that she knocked the chair over with a clatter and the cat went flying a good three feet. A few half-interested eyes glanced their way and the man tried to apologize, but she was already gone.

She'd hoped that a return to the clear night air would help her to breathe, but the further she walked the more her chest seemed to impact. The square was too crowded. She didn't deserve such company, and so kept walking, far past the point of knowing where she was. In the end, she found herself in an unoccupied street with an empty shop front, fairly lined with second-hand goods: tables and dusty jars and mirrors and cigar boxes and, teetering on top of a clock, a beaker of gently rotating eyeballs. She collapsed against a wooden door and buried her face in her arms to cry. It burst out of her like a dam, and she sobbed in a way she couldn't remember ever doing before, well and truly blubbering in misery. Her ribs and ankle and feet and face and heart all hurt.

Never before had she felt so lost, of purpose and of worth. Henry's face swam in her mind; his expression as they pulled him back into the dark had been one of sheer terror, and she'd just run away. The value of courage was not a lesson she, a young lady, had often been imparted with, but she'd read enough books to decide it was a merit that deserved to be upheld. Certainly she'd thought she'd be able to if it ever came down to the bones of a matter, but that only showed how stupid she really was. She was no hero. She wasn't anything particularly special at all. Before long she felt the cat at her side once again, rubbing his dirty ear against her sleeve, but that only made her sob harder. She gathered him up and wept into his fur at the idea that anything should be so loyal to her when she'd done nothing to deserve it.

Time passed slowly with her breath in her ears, but eventually the tears dried up, and she was left sitting in the gutter on an empty street between a cracked chamber pot and a bell jar full of dead flowers. She sniffed a few times, but there was no sorrow left to come out; instead, her guts felt to be spilling out of her abdomen, leaving a dark shivering hole in their place. As she sat up, something moved against the opposite wall; a cracked mirror was leaning crookedly from a broken wardrobe and reflecting her face back at her. She looked pale as a ghost, with her coat half-unbuttoned and her hair falling away all over the place. The dress was ripped badly along the seam and at some point she'd lost the bracelet of red glass, but the most haunting reminder of her once-lovely evening was in the scarlet stain on her lips. How could she have thought she looked beautiful? It was mismatched to her, a girl's sad attempt at being a woman. She choked a little as she tugged the pins out of her hair one by one and let them clatter to the ground. As each new lock came free, she found herself scowling deeply at her reflection.

What was she to do now? As the hair fell down around her shoulders, she felt wild anger in her heart, but no direction in which to send it. _I don't know how to fix anything,_ she thought as the last hairpin fell into her lap. She clearly wasn't capable of staging a rescue, and recruiting help would likely only get others hurt. A few hours ago she'd wanted nothing more than to quietly leave and never think of this evening or any of the people in it again, but she knew she could never really do such a thing now. She had responsibilities. So what was left? To try and make the madman see reason? To acquiesce to his demands?

She paused.

She did not trust the man with half a face and no name. But he had said he needed her. Might that give her the slightest of edges? _A wedding, _he'd said,_ and nothing more._ It wouldn't be hard. In fact, what he was asking seemed suspiciously little. He didn't seem even to want her dead, which was a small comfort for the thought of going back to the circus. Helene stared into her own eyes across the road. Who was she to let anyone she cared about be harmed, no matter the cost? And the realization came with a little thrill in her stomach that she _did_ care. The knowledge of it felt warmer now than cold. Caring was not something she would let hobble her anymore.

She stared so long and hard that her reflection warped into the visage of a stranger. Who was the girl in the mirror before her, really? She was a selfish and cold person, that she knew, but she was also smart, and she was level-headed – most of the time. She was solitary, but that made her independent; she wasn't easily angered, but when it happened, she knew how to draw strength from it. She was a girl whose father had walked between the lands of the living and the dead, and whose mother she was proud to share an aspect with. Even as she looked on, she could see a small smile touching her face. Her hands were curling into fists atop her knees.

Whatever she did, it was not going to be done with tears on her cheeks.

She stood up slowly, so that the cat had plenty of time to crawl from her lap. Her hands found their way to her coat buttons and she undid them, still staring at herself intently. The coat dropped to the ground behind her and she took a deep breath, watching her chest heave, her chin rise defiantly. She was not tall, but felt like she towered. Her dress was in ruins, but still fell full to the ground, like a flower that refused to die. When her lips curled into a true smile, they were defined by the red on them, as if they'd been carved from rubies.

She really did look a vision in scarlet.

Helene began her march slowly, stately, feeling a single-mindedness that she'd never experienced before. Her anger was intoxicating, and she did not want to let it go. She didn't know the way back, but still found her feet drawing her in the right direction. Here was a corpse with his head tucked under his arm; there was a skeleton in a cheongsam. All their eyes were drawn to her, not just for her living pallor, but for the purposefulness radiating off of her like heat. The square was coming up ahead, full of noise and chatter, and this time Helene stepped out into it sure that it was where she needed to be.

And indeed, there she stood: the red-headed one of Dottie's friends, her single eye batting liberally at the small crowd of men gathered around her. That same eye went wide when it lit upon Helene's haggard form. "Dear!" she said, brushing away a sailor's hand, which had broken off and started to creep inappropriately downward. She bustled over to the girl and took up her hands. "Why, what's happened to you? Y' look like you been chewed up and spitten back out again."

Helene was glad that her manner wasn't quite as enthusiastic as Dottie's. She was not in the mood for theatrics. "I'm alright," she said rather softly. The woman's hands were very cold on her wrists. "I lost the bracelet you gave me. I'm sorry."

"Lookin' the sort of night you've had, that's probably the last of anyone's problems," the woman said. She began to lead her toward the road by the pub. "Come on, we'd best get you cleaned up."

"Thank you," Helene said, but she stopped and pulled away.

"Dear?" said the woman.

"I'm fine," Helene told her. She bit her lip. Her hands went to the tangled locks of hair falling over her shoulders and she cast her eyes down on the ruined skirt. None of it was unsalvageable.

"I'm sorry to ask another favor tonight," she said. "But do you think you could help me to prepare for a wedding?"

* * *

><p><strong>After a run of chapters that have gotten progressively longer and longer, this is really only half of what was planned for this update, but fuggit, here. I might edit this and the next into a whole sometime in the future. Second half to come soon... uh, hopefully, anyway.<strong>


	13. No True Wedding

**Told you I'd update soon! I've also realized just why I had so much trouble writing all summer... Turns out I do most of my drafting in class instead of taking notes, and without that impelling boredom to push me, I fell off the wagon. Good thing I'm back in school now, huh? :) :( :/**

13

Victor had long ago lost the habit of tracking the hours and years, which made the time spent in the black even more unbearable for the unseen distance it stretched into both the future and the past. Rats lurked in the darkness all around, heard but unseen, and the light filtering from the tattered canvas was cloying, unchanging green. Already the night seemed as though it had lasted forever, and Victor felt like he'd been looking for an escape for even longer.

On his hands and knees he ran his fingers over dusty, splintered floor of the cage, looking for absolutely anything he could pull away. A door, a keyhole, a loose plank of wood. There was nothing. The boy called Henry sat huddled against the bars of the lion's cage, quiet and covered in bites and looking ashamed. "I'm sorry," he mumbled for the third or fourth time as something skittered along the metal paneling above their heads. "I should never have let her come into harm's way. I should have known. I'm truly sorry, Mister Van Dort. I didn't know."

His guilt was both touching and needless – without his help she'd probably be locked up in his place and much worse off – but Victor was finding it hard to muster the focus to offer comfort. His mind was stuck on whether Helene would come back. It had been an hour by now, certainly, maybe two. Maybe she had left. She might have heeded his words to leave and now was tucked safely away in her bed Upstairs, never to be bothered with him or his like again.

It was the best he could have hoped for, but he knew it wasn't true. And because of that, it was more imperative now than ever that they find a way to escape before she had to return.

On the grotesque throne in the center of the tent sat the enormous rat named Benjamin, his hunched form a silhouette in the distance. He seemed to be watching them. A low, rumbling crack sounded through the dark as he ground his teeth together, and from the shadows echoed a hundred fellow rats, chittering in response. The sound of the living horde made Victor's skin crawl as he drew his hands across the floor again. It was waxy smooth. "How is the lock on the door?" he asked of the boy against the wall. Henry looked up at him, then to the cage door, and slowly righted himself to tug on the lock. Victor had already checked twice, but hoped maybe the third time would finally have it snap. It didn't.

He sat up and ran his hand through his hair, preoccupied with the thought of escape. Henry, meanwhile, slid back down to his seated position and began to feel the areas around the edges of the door, having finally caught on to the pressing need of the moment. "Mister Van Dort?" he asked quietly after a moment spent gently rattling the bars. Victor looked up. "I'm sorry to ask," he said. "Maybe it's not my concern, but I couldn't help but notice that there was, uh… somethin' strange happenin', you know, interpersonal-wise, when Miss Van Dort was here." He shifted to sit on his knees and looked up. "Do you know that man? The one who's friends with these rats?"

Victor took another of the deep breaths that always wooshed emptily through his ribcage. "Yes, I did. A very long time ago."

"Oh." Henry twisted at the metal frame of the doorway in the solid plate wall. "And is he really going to have them loose on us?"

Victor was going to give a relatively comforting 'I don't know,' but decided that the situation was too grim to let the boy be anything but prepared for the worst. "I th-think so," he said. "Yes."

Henry continued picking at the door without speaking for a moment. "Then how do you think that'll go?" he asked, more quietly than before. "Was he just using that to get Miss Van Dort to come back, do you think? It can't actually be bad, can it? We're dead." He settled into a crouch and began flicking at the hinges. "We're dead." From above them a rat clicked and shuddered, in a manner that sounded very much like mean laughter.

Victor didn't want to speculate. Frankly, his thoughts were much less on what was going to happen him before the morning came, than on what would happen to Helene. If she returned, would it be with the knowledge of what a marriage between the living and the dead actually entailed? Most likely not, unless by she'd spoken of it with Bonejangles, or Miss Plum, or any of the handful of others still present Downstairs since his own wedding. If she did know, would she care? That idea was more troubling. The dead had showered her with attention, and kindness, and dances and fine gowns; would she possibly decide that death was a small price to pay for his freedom? She might think it was simply better here. He'd once nearly decided the same, and he'd been even older (wiser, maybe) than she was now.

Surely she was smart enough to see that death was not a dance all the time, that the bright lights and fiery drinks were just there to push back at the dark and the cold. It was lonely Downstairs. The sky was heavy and low. Death was not just freedom from fatigue and pain; it was inability to grow, in body or in mind. He couldn't think of a worse fate to impart upon a child.

And he had promised he wouldn't let anything hurt her.

_Kangg._

Victor was startled from his thoughts by a small ring and a shrill thump. "Oops," Henry said. Into the slotted light across the cage floor slowly rolled the door-hinge nail. Victor stared at it blankly for a moment before his eyes widened.

"Sorry," Henry said.

"Don't apologize," Victor said, scrambling over toward the door to examine the newly-loose hinge. "That's exactly right." He laid his own hand on the highest one. "Do it again."

In absence of a thunderously pounding heart, Victor felt his ears were instead full of rushing air to distract him from his hard-to-maintain silence as he and Henry finally crept out of the lion's cage and into the tent at large. At first he'd been sure that they would be apprehended by dozens of little squealing animals the second they stepped foot out of the cage, but no alarm was raised. Then he was sure they'd be rushed as they took their first, second, and third steps, but still, no reaction. They moved through the dark as slowly and quietly as beetles, measuring every step against the dirt floor to avoid raising a ruckus. They stayed facing the chair in the center of the tent at all times. Benjamin did not move or seem to notice them.

In half an eternity, there loomed the tent wall at their backs, and one by one the men slipped underneath it. Victor had a bit more of a problem with keeping all his limbs from catching on the canvas and betraying their position, but both made it out into the half-light of the path outside.

The close trees on all sides were dead silent, and there was no one to be seen. That there were no guards, either human or rodent, in the area struck Victor as very strange, but there was nothing to do but to keep going. He took each step carefully, wary of every singular pine needle that might snap under his shoes. Henry was walking mostly on the balls of his feet for caution as they left the tent behind.

They kept on slowly. Every single step was one on which they expected a shape or twelve to materialize from the shadows, but it never happened. The lanterns in the trees were only half-lit. Was it possible that Barkis was gone for the time being? Unlikely. Henry pointed forward, and a few hundred yards ahead in the trees Victor spotted the back side of an archway that had once shared a greeting to visitors, now reading only a foreboding 'SPECTACLE'. His heart leapt as they picked up their pace. It was the exit. They had only to pass through the large clearing; they might make it. He could hardly contain a nervous smile as he made a turn around a wooden barrier along the path –

And ran bodily into an enormous blue corpse in a tattered strongman's fur. The man's tired yellow eyes looked down on him as he stumbled backward, and he sighed. "'Pologies for this, sir," he said dutifully as he reached down and snagged Victor's arms. Two rats peeked out from beneath the fur piece. Henry hadn't time to turn around before two women in gymnast's dresses snuck behind to bind his arms.

"Ooh, this one's cute," said one.

"Really sorry, sir," the other, pudgier one said, and she sounded like she meant it.

Victor struggled mightily as the strongman wheeled him around toward the clearing, but he might well have put up more of a fight by just hanging limp. As he cast his eyes outward desperately, he saw for the first time just what had happened to the clearing they'd been about to enter. The lanterns woven through the trees were bright and almost cheerful, laced with garlands of dead flowers and broken bones, which Victor badly hoped weren't being used by anyone anymore. The dry, dead ground had had a long, rough aisle carved into it, with two dozen pews of haphazard scrap wood composed in rows on either side. At the head of it all sat an altar composed of an appropriated elephant's stand, star-spangled and splintered. And of course, on top of everything else, rats were crawling beneath the pews, along the branches of the trees, poking their heads out of the flower arrangements. For just a second he felt himself confused by the scene; its purpose dawned on him in perfect time to be ushered in by a deep and unkind laugh.

Barkis Bittern turned from the altar, his face as always twisted into a permanent smile to scare the skin off the dead. No longer was he ragged-looking and stooped; he'd redressed into a very disconcertingly crisp dark surgeon officer's uniform, lightly decorated and with both a shortsword and a dagger on his hip. Where he would have gotten such a thing was impossible to imagine; surely it couldn't be his. He still walked with a limp, but the change of attire had had the unfortunate effect of making him seem twice as large as he already was. He stepped down from the altar toward Victor, every inch of him visibly shuddering with delight.

"Van Dort!" he cried, making a mockery of high-mindedness with his broad gesture of welcome. "How wonderful of you to join us, and just in time. I'd heard you were coming." From behind a pew slunk Benjamin, seeming to eye Victor smugly. He felt like a fool for believing they'd escaped unnoticed. Again he tried to struggle, but couldn't move even an inch. "Sorry," the strongman said again from behind.

"Don't do this," Victor said. He _had_ to say it, though he knew it would make no difference. "She has nothing to do with what happened back – b-back then. Leave her out of it."

Barkis _tsk_ed. "Goodness. So self-centered, to imagine that this is still about the two of us after all these years. Every word I said was true." His voice dripped condescension.

If Victor had still had blood running through his veins, he'd surely have been shaking. "She doesn't know," he stammered. "Th-the living can't marry the -" It was pointless, of course. Barkis's smile spread ever wider at the idea.

"Oh, yes, poor dear thing. Do be a good fellow and refrain from mentioning it, will you? I'd hate to give her jitters for the ceremony." The lantern glow glinted lightly off of the brass buttons. "I must say, this all became _much_ easier when she told us who she really was. These affairs are ever so much more pleasant when things are out in the open, don't you think? Especially between a husband and wife to be." Victor wasn't sure he'd ever been so full of hate for the man. Not when his own life had been threatened; maybe not even when Victoria's had been.

"I take it from our lady's use of the past tense," Barkis continued, "that our dear Miss Ever- oh, I'm sorry, Missus _Van Dort –_ is no longer among us? Either above or belowground, it seems." He shone his fingernails against the wool of the uniform. "Goodness. So I see she never really wanted either of us, in the end." Victor felt struck for a moment, which Barkis took as an opening to add, "I shan't hold it against her. In fact, I think it may ultimately be beneficial to add a little new blood into our arrangement. The girl does look so much like her mother…"

His tone was contemptible enough, but what broke Victor's silence was that he wouldn't stop _smiling_. "Sh-she won't come," he lied.

Barkis's smile grew even wider. "Wrong," he said, and turned with an arm to the sign: SPECTACLE. "She's already here."

* * *

><p>She knew they were expecting her. She was glad of it. The sooner they were face-to-face, the sooner this might be over and done. Between the tree trunks she could hear, more than see, the little furry bodies moving, scurrying around roots and over dry leaves, their tiny black eyes 'pop'ing at every blink. On the path ahead of her, the tomcat slunk with a growl in his throat and his ears flung back, eyes flitting constantly to either side. He was just a cat, but she was glad to have him. It felt very much like being escorted to the battlefield by a tiny lion.<p>

Helene did not let her composure falter at the pressing movement from the forest. She was frightened, but didn't want to show it, so she kept her head high. In one hand, she held a small bouquet of dried flowers, scrounged from decorative vases in the ladies' dressing room; in the other, she kept aloft the lamp-lighter, bright with a small flame. The red dress had been straightened but not stitched, and dragged ragged and bright and full against the dry ground. Her hair was bound up delicately once more, perhaps with more care than such a perverse occasion deserved, but she was glad her outward composure was there to steel that inside. The sheer crimson veil before her face that had been pulled off of an evening gown lent her view of the forest a hellish red tint. The ladies had tried to question her as they helped her dress and prepare, but she had steadfastly refused to share anything but her thanks for their help. She wanted no one else to find themselves in danger tonight. Only the gingery deacon following nervously behind her with an enormous old book in his arms could accompany, and then only because she suspected he would be necessary. His willingness to come had been touching, and hopefully he would not have to regret it. She took a deep breath and let a grim smile touch her lips. She at least owed him the decency of looking sure of herself.

Now they were almost there. The sickly green lanterns were threading through the dead trees, and above the branches there it loomed: SPECTACLE. The chattering in the trees, the shaking branches, the blinking eyes, were all increasing. She would not show that she heard.

Helene stepped into the clearing behind the fat tomcat, bouquet at her navel, flame held aloft. A grotesque altar had been erected with splintering pews at attention, swarming with hungry-looking rats. Her eyes swept the area and she had to force herself not to glance back. Henry and her father were being held to the side of the groom's pews, clearly frightened but blessedly unchewed. She wanted to look to Henry, smile at him and let him know, _I came back for you,_ but did not betray her coolness. Her eyes narrowed as they lit upon the altar and the man standing before it. He looked almost respectable in military uniform, replete with decoration at lapel and hip. It was verging on possible to ignore the rotting white of his skull peeking out one side.

"You brought guests," he said, his smile fixed and inscrutable. "I'm so _glad _you could find friends to celebrate with us on this joyful day."

At the sound of his voice, Helene's stomach plunged and simultaneously grew very hot. "I brought an officiator," she said boldly, relieved that her voice did not tremble. With a theatrically casual flick, she closed the lamp-lighter and tucked it into a fold of her skirt. "It wouldn't do for this not to take and have to do it all over again, would it? I couldn't possibly stand the boredom." The last line came unbidden, but she was glad to see the madman's eyes narrow.

"Feisty, Van Dort," he shot toward her father, whose arms were bound by the hands of the strongest-looking strongman Helene had ever seen. The madman's smile expanded from fixed to frighteningly genuine. "I like that."

Victor struggled in the enormous man's grip. "Go!" she heard him call to her, and she turned back in time to see a number of rats rushing toward his feet. "Don't -" Suddenly, he stopped speaking. The rats had disappeared up his coatsleeves, and his head drooped forward for a moment before snapping back up. The strongman let him go, and he stood still, looking uncertain and then scared. Henry, too, was released by the women hold him, and took only a step forward before coming to a halt, stiff as a board.

Behind Helene, the young deacon named Alphonse was mumbling to himself and flipping through his book. He looked hardly able to read a line with his frequent nervous glances around, but then he turned the page and grew curiously still.

"Miss Van Dort, there's something you sh- Yeagh!" He yelped as another rat scampered up his robe to clamber onto the open page, squealing. He nearly dropped the book shaking it off.

"Now, now, Brother," said the dead man, voice sweet and low. "Wouldn't want to worry her unnecessarily, would we? A bride is already excited for her wedding day." Helene silently smoldered inside at his use of the word, and Alphonse found himself being herded up the aisle by a small swarm of rodents. He passed by Helene, looking bewildered and overwhelmed. She felt bad already for bringing him. Lord hoped it would be over soon.

As Alphonse found himself behind the altar, the madman took a smiling step down the aisle toward her. "You look lovely, my dear, but I don't know that a virgin bride should choose red for herself. One could be given the wrong idea." He was fingering the shortsword on his belt.

Heat trailed up her cheeks. "I didn't know the groom should bring _vermin_ to the ceremony, either," Helene said hotly, crossing her arms with the bouquet still in hand. Some dry petals went fluttering. "One might think he had no one else to invite." It wasn't the sharpest of insults, but it was better than her first instinct, to go pink and mutter to herself that red was all she'd had on hand. His smile did not falter.

"I think we might both enjoy this very much if we're only civil," he said. She felt insulted by the false graciousness in his voice and was about to speak, but he was clearly done. "Come now, my dear. We have a date to keep." A minor chord suddenly struck out over the attendees. Recessed behind the altar sat a box organ with a lumpy man jerkily pounding the keys. Rats perched on the bench with him, looking to enjoy the discordant sounds. It was nightmarish, but not so much as Helene's realization that the music marked the opening of the ceremony. She was about to be married.

There was no procession to speak of, just a hundred rats in the pews. "But of course, a father should walk his eldest to the altar," the madman cried delightedly, and threw an arm out to Victor, who began walking toward Helene immediately, stiff like a doll. He didn't speak to her as he approached, but his eyes were wide. From beneath his collar, she saw two sneaking tails; she frowned. He pulled up precisely to her side, and they linked arms. The music was high in the air and varied back and forth between notes sweet and sour, like a funeral dirge. It wasn't all unlike the ball, actually, just infinitely more horrible.

They stayed still for just a second, and then Helene took a step, which Victor followed in perfect, stiff time. With another step he matched her again. Perhaps his coordination was a little better this way, actually. She glanced at him through the veil, step by step, and he looked back, a desperate expression in his eyes, but still unspeaking. She expected he couldn't. Bastards.

They passed the pews one by one, while the bones in the trees rattled and the horrible music pressed up against their ears. She tightened her elbow around her father's arm a little and kept her eyes forward. Her heart felt large in her throat, like a fire burning at the base. "I won't let them hurt you," she said, quietly, but enough so that she knew he'd hear. "I'm not frightened. And I won't let them hurt me, either. I promise." She stole a quick look over and then back again. He didn't speak, but she didn't need him to.

At the altar they broke away from one another, him with mechanical precision. She kept her eyes on the madman and, slowly, swept up her veil. For the first time, she saw him in close quarters and adequate light, and was surprised to find that he wasn't really so imposing as she'd expected. At his stage of decomposition, he couldn't be a true vision of horror. He was just falling apart. It was pathetic, really. All his fancy uniforms and swords couldn't disguise that he was a sad, dead shell of a man. She felt a surge of electricity in her body as she realized that she was going to go on from tonight alive and well, and make him disappear forever. Really, he was doing her a favor in this! She gripped her bouquet tighter and felt a little smile quirk her cheeks.

The organ ceased to play.

Everything was silent for a second. Alphonse looked petrified, until a withering glare from the madman started him to movement.

"Uh, yes, uh, of course,' he stumbled, his book laid before him like an instruction manual. "Dearly… dearly… attending, we are gathered here today to join these two… These two people, in marriage. Matrimony." Once again his eyes seemed unable to sit still, this time flitting to and from Victor's, and with a very strange expression. It looked as though he had a pressing question he couldn't ask. He swallowed. "If the, uh, the groom, will… go on…"

The altar was laid out with the traditional two candles and single cup of wine, so rank that she could smell it at a distance, and on the groom's side a small white ring, which looked as though it might have been carved from bone, all cast sick green from the lanterns. Helene had never been a girl to fantasize about her wedding, but she could never in a dozen lifetimes have imagined that it would look like this. She was glad in a way that the officiator was butchering his piece; it served to further cement that this was no true wedding, and she no true bride. She was not really getting married, after all; she was fulfilling her end of a bargain. Someday she would have a real wedding to push this farce from her memory forever, and good riddance. She felt Victor's eyes on her, wide and scared, but kept her gaze to the front.

The madman, with almost laughable gravity, lifted his candle and his hand. "With this hand," he began, taking three steps toward the altar to light the bride's wick, "I will lift your sorrows." The raised hand, thin and bone white, extended to snatch the goblet by its stem. His eyes burned into hers like hot mean coals. "Your cup will never empty..." he took a swig from the pewter, "…for I will be your wine." For some reason, his lips curled into a smile then. She didn't like it. She would not show him that she didn't like it.

"With this candle," he continued, lifting the bride's candle and handing it to her with delicacy, "I will light your way in darkness." The smile was broadening. She hardly tried to disguise her distaste. "With this ring…" came the last line, and he lifted the little white ring. He took her hand with his own disgustingly cold one and slipped it over her finger. "With this ring, I ask you to be mine."

At least his vows were over quickly. Helene stared at the ring on her hand for just a moment. It was the color of a fish's underbelly, and made her feel as slimy for wearing it, but she looked up and sought to remember the bride's words recited at her cousin Edwina's wedding the year before. She took a deep breath and raised her right hand. "With this hand," she began, "I will aid your struggles." Her nose wrinkled as it caught a whiff of the wine, but she reached for it anyway. "My cup will never empty, for I will drink your wine." She thought she heard her father try to make a strangled sound from behind, but ignored it and knocked back what was left in the goblet with one gulp. It tasted halfway to vinegar and hit her vision immediately, which was strange for wine, but she didn't let herself cough or falter, though her throat seized in protest. "With this candle, I will follow you in darkness," she said, voice just a little strangled, and laid her own candle back upon the altar. "With this ring…" She glanced back at the bone-white ring, rough-hewn and macabre. This was it. "I accept that you are mine."

She half expected a clap of thunder as the last word passed her lips, but there was no fanfare outside of the squeals of the rats in the pews. She glanced backward and to the side, wondering what to do next. At her side, the madman's smile still had not faltered.

Annoyance snapped at her momentarily. "Well?" she asked, crossing her arms and blinking quickly at the dizziness the small movement elicited in her. "I filled my half of the deal. What about you?"

The damned smile seemed to grow even on the skeletal half of his face. "It's not done quite yet, my sweet," the madman said, fingering his belt. "You see, technically, the living can't really marry the dead." A shock went through her. What was that supposed to mean? His eyes looked past her wildly, his voice high with ecstatic contempt. "If you'd only thought to ask your _father."_

Helene turned to the left and saw Victor collapse suddenly as three rats ran out from his sleeves. She started, but he'd hardly hit the ground when he looked up and cried, "Barkis, don't!"

For an instant Helene didn't know to whom he was speaking. She'd never heard such a name. Then she turned her eyes back to the madman and saw that he had his sword in hand. The dagger was laid out on the altar. Alphonse stood stiffly, wide-eyed behind the platform with little rat hands pressed against his mouth.

Just for a moment, Helene felt her brain go quite blank. Everything slowed. She had nothing in mind to prepare for this. The madman – Barkis? This was Barkis? – took the dagger in hand. She turned back toward her father, an act that seemed to take an eternity. He wasn't halfway to his feet. He'd known, she realized, and had tried to tell her, and she'd promised she wouldn't get hurt, right to his face. She saw now that that had been unaccountably cruel of her.

"Dad," she began, and that was all she was able to say before the madman's hands crossed into her vision from either side of her body, each wielding a glinting slice of gray metal. Time rushed back into proper flow as they touched against her, one after the other, and with it came smooth force and two brutally cold movements.

First he stabbed her in the stomach.

Then he slit her throat.

* * *

><p><strong>This chapter is in memory of my tiny ratty baby girl, Wilma, who was old as time in rat years and finally passed away on October 2. She was the softest sweetest thing ever. RIP little lady.<strong>


	14. Bright, Brave, Wonderful

**So I take back everything I said before about being able to better maintain an update schedule while I'm in school; reality seems to be that I'm just a horribly irregular writer no matter what the circumstances. Least I didn't make you guys all wait an *entire* calendar season this time! ¯\_(ツ)_/¯**

14

Before Helene knew anything else, she knew that she was crying. In darkness like a dream, she sobbed, her face in her knees and her hands in her hair, and she was sure of nothing else outside of the soreness of her eyes and her jaw, not even the reason for her tears. The void pressed close, like a warm blanket, like a hug, and for a timeless eon, there was nothing in the world but her and the salt on her face.

Slowly, the void took form.

There was ground, then, beneath her feet and her hips. Dimly, she became aware that between her sobs, her eyelids were fluttering open, and the weakest of light was sneaking in between her knees to pinch at her sore vision. Her shoes were loose and the bodice of her dress was much too tight for her to be leant forward as she was. As she sat up, sniffing, she felt something fall softly from her shoulders. A gentle embrace was pulled away, and a hand brushed hair from her forehead as she opened her wet eyes.

Helene was sitting on the floor of a dark kitchen, of all places, with a woman at her side. The tile was black and white, and through the window on the wall before her an enormous full moon shone stark silver across her feet. She squinted unhappily, confusedly at it for a moment. This was not a kitchen she'd ever seen before, but it felt familiar, somehow. The hearth was cold, but the room had the warm feeling of having long been well-loved. Her eyes drifted across the floor and fell to the lap of the woman on the ground next to her, who still sat with an arm around her shoulders, and looked up slowly. It was hard to see in the dark, but the lady seemed not so much older than her. She had a sweet heart-shaped face and kind eyes, and looked startlingly familiar. Helene blinked twice and then swallowed. She might as well have been staring into a mirror.

"You're…" she started, and then dropped her voice. The woman smiled. It couldn't be. She whispered, "Mother?"

Victoria's eyes were warm, and she took her hand. "Hello," she said. "I've waited so long to meet you."

Helene didn't know what to think. "But… how can…?" She stopped and turned her wide-eyed gaze to the room. "Is this a kitchen? Where am I?" It seemed not an unreasonable first question, even all else considered.

"I'm sorry," Victoria said, sounding very sad. "You're dead." Both words hit like little punches, but Helene bit her lip and knew she oughtn't to be surprised. Her hand floated to her throat and she was surprised to find it dry, not sticky and red. She swallowed hard at the memory of the steel cutting into her flesh, through cartilage and – she stopped thinking about it.

"This isn't the Land of the Dead," Helene said slowly. There was no moon Downstairs, that was the first thing she'd ever learned about the place. But if her mother was here, this certainly wasn't the Land of the Living either. "Where did you come from? …Where are we?"

Victoria's hands drifted down to take both of hers and squeeze gently. Her fingers were warm and soft and her voice a little sheepish. "That's sort of a long story." Helene didn't like the sound of that. "This place is different for everyone. A… a crossroads, might be the best word. I've been waiting here for you."

She wasn't sure she could believe that. "For sixteen whole years?"

"Oh, no, dear," Victoria smiled. "It was no time at all."

That didn't make any sense, and the very first streak of annoyance she'd ever had with her mother crossed her heart. "Here now," she said a little hotly. "Just explain things to me, clearly. What do you mean by a crossroads, and why are you here?" She was being a bit pushy, perhaps, but Helene wasn't sure how much patience she really had for delicately-worded vagueness right now. She was _dead._ She was out of time to waste.

Victoria actually smiled, though, looking almost abashed. "Goodness," she said. "I never learned to speak for myself so strongly. Your father never did… Where did you get that from?"

What kind of question was that? "I don't know," said Helene, gathering her knees up about her chest defensively. "It's just how I am."

"Well, I admire it greatly," Victoria said plainly, and Helene was given pause. The way she 'just was' usually rubbed people the wrong way, and she knew her mother had been so sweet and kind and perfect that it seemed obvious she should be disappointed in her as well. Victoria's voice caught a little. "I… I truly regret not being there to help you become the girl you did."

Helene wasn't sure what to say to that for a moment. "Well…" She started, and then stopped again. "I mean… You could have met me Downstairs tonight. You could have been with Father there." Her voice was nearly a whisper. She was certain that if Victoria had been there to greet her that night, absolutely none of its tears or dramatics or bloodshed would have ever happened. It could have been the best birthday of her life. "Why didn't you stay with him? You were dead too but you didn't stay. He… he was lost." To mention her own feelings of abandonment seemed too self-centered. "He needed you."

"I…" Victoria actually seemed lost for words. She drew away and pressed a hand against her mouth. "I am so sorry," she said, and her voice was a little bit quavery. "He couldn't have known why I did it. I am so sorry for every moment he spent hurt by my absence." She looked positively heartbroken and Helene wished she'd said nothing. "But…" Victoria sniffed a little and sent her gaze back to her daughter, "there was someone else who needed me more."

"Who?" Helene asked. She blinked once. "Me?"

"Your father gave you a very special gift before he passed," Victoria said, voice still wet but her face brighter. "And I needed to make sure that you knew to use it when the time came."

Helene hadn't the smallest idea what she was talking about. "What, do you mean to say… I'd be very good at the piano if I ever tried...?" She had the feeling that this was a very stupid guess.

"Any artistic talent you might have gotten from your father is almost certainly canceled by your relation to me," Victoria said wryly. "I'm afraid my hands are where art goes to die." Helene smiled at that. "No, I mean something real. Over by the windowsill – look."

Helene turned to the window through which the silver moonlight was falling, and noticed for the first time a small item sitting on the sill. Curiously, she rose to her feet and approached it. It was only a few inches high – a tiny glass vase in which stood a small, five-petaled white flower that seemed to carry an unearthly glow in the light. Helene picked up the ensemble curiously. Moonlight shone off of the petals at all angles.

She was so entranced that she hardly heard Victoria approach from behind. The woman stood at her side quietly for a full minute. "You weren't well when you were born," she said quietly, and Helene looked up. "They called it… It was a stillbirth. I wasn't well either, but I remember." She wrapped her arms around herself with a thousand-mile stare. Helene didn't know what to say. "But your father… He came back to both of us with a gift from – from a place in between life and death, where we're standing now. And he gave it to you." She smiled at Helene, her eyes glimmering wetly.

Helene rolled the flower stem between her fingers wordlessly. Stillborn? That didn't make any sense at all. She'd always been a perfectly robust and healthy baby, Mrs. Hall told her so. And yet, what had been one of the first things her father ever said to her, but that his daughter had died long ago? That was an unsettling thought. "But I'm not dead," she said. "Or I wasn't before now." The logic seemed self-evident.

"No," Victoria said. "You weren't, because of this little flower." She took it from Helene's hand and gently ran her fingers along the petals, gazing at it lovingly. She looked back to her daughter with a little smile. "I suppose that after all that's happened tonight you must believe in magic?"

Surprisingly, Helene hadn't put much thought into it. She hadn't had much time for thought. "I suppose I must," she agreed.

"Then you should know," Victoria said, handing the bloom back to her, "that some kinds of magic can save a person from death, if you love them very much. Like your father does. Like I do." Helene was unaccustomed to being told so often the many ways in which she was loved. She would have thought it would make her feel uncomfortable, but it just made her feel fuzzy. "He gave the life of that flower to you, and didn't even realize it. He never knew that you lived." The look on Victoria's face was one of reminiscing about her dear silly husband, as though missing something so big would have been very typical of him. "I imagine he stayed Downstairs from the guilt of thinking that he failed the both of us. His last wish was to see his family grow strong, and that couldn't ever be." She whisked a finger under her eye. "I believe I would have done the same, but I… I was asked to stay here so that I could tell you, when the time came."

"Who asked that?"

"An old friend," Victoria said gently, "who promised me that, in the end, everything was going to be alright."

They were simple words, but Helene felt strangely comforted by them.

"Look into the yard," Victoria continued, and Helene looked up to gaze out of the window. The landscape was all gray and moon-silvered, with misty pines in the far distance and a sweeping lawn before them. All over were dotted bushes and terraced vines resplendent in shining, glowing white flowers, like little flames hiding in the shrubbery. "You see, there are two paths out of the garden," Victoria said. "When some people die, they can only find the one that leads them Downstairs, and they take it without ever remembering they did so. The other path goes On. Not so many people can find it, at least not at first, I don't think." Helene gazed out at the moon-washed landscape and felt the beauty of it tugging at her heart. She would have been honored to take a walk out across the grass and see where it brought her. "But you…" And Victoria took her by the shoulders and turned her from the view at the window. "There's a third path for you."

"What?" Helene asked. "Where to?"

"Back," her mother said.

"Back where?"

"Back where you came from," Victoria said. "Because most people, their lives are like candles, which burn for as long as they can and then run out of wick, and they sputter out. But you haven't got a candle inside. You have a flower." She looked so loving and gentle, in the moonlight. "You know the special thing about flowers?" Helene shook her head dumbly. "They can bloom over and over again." And her mother squeezed her shoulders, and pulled her close into a deep embrace.

It seemed, almost, as though the room itself was beginning to warp and become larger. The window towered on the black wall before them; the stovepipe across from it was stretching longer and longer against the tile. Helene wasn't sure what to do for a second, but she returned the hug and realized that she'd never really held anyone in such a way before. Victoria's arms were warm and solid around her, and the feeling of it was making her very, very sad. Hugging a mother was never something she'd agonized over her inability to do, but this small taste of it – just once – was both comforting and heartbreaking. Victoria's hand stroked the back of her head. She smelled like rose petals. Helene was fairly certain she was never going to be able to smell roses again without wanting to cry.

She sniffed and they both finally pulled away. Victoria looked like she was growing teary as well. "I just don't understand," Helene said, her throat caught up with pressure. "How… how are you here, though? If everyone's 'here' is different, how can you be in mine?"

"Well, we've never been very far apart, really," Victoria whispered back, brushing Helene's hair from her face. "After all, every girl's got a bit of her mother in her." Helene spluttered tearily into her hand.

The moon's light seemed to be spreading further across the ground, though its body sat stationary in the sky. Mother and daughter stood before each other, crying a little and yet, somehow, sort of happy. Helene darted in to squeeze her mother around the ribs again, and then pulled away for the last time, brushing her eyes clear. She took a shaky breath and turned her gaze upward to the blanched white face of the moon. "I – I don't know how to go back like you said," she admitted.

Victoria shook her head a little as well, pushing a stray strand of hair behind her ear. "I'm afraid I couldn't tell you," she said, her voice almost good-humored through the tears. "But I think you'll figure it out. You bright, brave, wonderful woman." No one, ever, had called her that before. "I will always be proud to be your mother."

Helene swallowed and looked away, blushing, before turning her attention to the kitchen. The more she thought about it, the more she thought she could feel which direction she needed to go in. It wasn't out the door to the garden; her eyes moved instead to the wall by the stove, a smooth expanse of white tile set glowing in a patch of light.

She stepped toward it and placed her hand against the stone. It felt warm, and almost soft, as if her fingers might pass right through. This was it, then. She turned to Victoria one last time.

"It will hurt if you go back," her mother said concernedly. "I'm afraid you're not in the best condition. You've lost a lot of blood."

Well, then she would have to brace herself for that. Helene nodded and said, "Thank you."

Victoria's pretty face split into a sweet loving smile. "And thank you," she said. "For being everything I ever could have hoped for." Again, Helene blushed in embarrassment. She was about to put her hand to the wall again when Victoria added, "And give your father my regards. Tell him… I'm so sorry I wasn't there for him."

"I will," said Helene, "but I know already he's forgiven you."

She shot her mother one last look, and then pushed her hand purposefully into the wall. It gave way like a piece of paper stretched across a frame and all of a sudden she felt herself falling forward, tumbling through the dark while the last traces of winking moonlight pulled the sight of the black kitchen away from her.

Her mother's smile took longer than anything else to fade from her eyes and her mind.

* * *

><p><strong>(This is sappy as hell but I feel okay about that for now because it's Christmas! AND GOD BLESS US GEEKS STILL PAYING ATTENTION TO CORPSE BRIDE FANFIC TEN YEARS AFTER THE FACT, EVERY ONE)<strong>


	15. Bloody Hell

15

"No!"

He wasn't fast enough. Damn these dead bones, these legs that always been too long for his brain to manage. He landed on his knees as the rats scattered and tried to move, to get up and stop the blade as another corpse had once done for him a long time ago, but he just wasn't fast enough.

She'd looked baffled. Innocent, almost. "Dad?" she'd asked. She'd looked to her father like a little girl, to ask him her last question, and then without another word she was gone. Blood flowed suddenly down her neck like ribbons and she collapsed to the ground, while Barkis stepped away from the rippling pool of her red dress and flicked his dagger delicately to clear the blood, looking down on her with a triumphant and jumping laugh in his throat.

How much could a soul still hurt after sixteen years dead? Victor scrambled to her side to hold her shoulders, looking into her eyes as if it could help. "Helene," he choked, squeezing her unresponsive hand. Her eyelids fluttered, twice, five times, and then stilled. There was more blood on the ground than it seemed a small girl could ever hold. In comparison to the sheets on her white neck, it was almost hard to see the wound on her stomach, where the fluid matched the red of the dress in perfect hue. Victor hadn't had a heart to pump with adrenaline for years, but still his hands shook as he held her head, thoughtless of the deepening pool of red on the dry ground. "No," he said again. "No…"

Alphonse, standing behind the altar, looked baffled, heartbroken, the poor boy. "How can…" The rats were scuffling in his hair and chewing on his robes, but he seemed not to notice anymore. "You… You can't kill her. You're interfering…"

Barkis was still laughing, harder now, his ragged body shaking visibly beneath the grand brassy uniform. "Oh, sh-she was dead before she hit the ground," he chortled, tossing the reddened sword down atop her where she lay. "It's beautiful! She drank the poison of her own volition and I just sped things up." The sour smell of the wine seemed thicker, this close to the ground. "Really, I just thought it appropriate, Van Dort. How right that she should die the same way as her new-wed husband once did." He crouched low next to the man and dropped his voice: "And now, as then, it's_ all_ because of you…"

Victor's trembling hands suddenly seized and clenched, and he spun to the side with a fury. _WHAM!_ His fist collided solidly with the fleshy half of the madman's face, and it was so instantly gratifying that he wondered why he'd not done it years before. Barkis ended up on the ground, holding his face with Victor towering furiously above him at six-foot-and-change, only for a moment before the horde swarmed in and pulled him down.

Barkis started laughing again, standing up with a hand to the flesh on his face, which looked looser in the aftermath of the blow. "I don't know why you're so upset," he hissed through skeletal teeth, on the back of a cackle. "Really, Van Dort, I've done you a favor! Father and daughter dearest, together forever under the Earth! It's a _happy_ ending. Do you think they'll bury her next to you?" Victor was struggling mightily, but couldn't rise from his knees as the rats weighed him down. "If only dear Victoria could be here, and we'd see the whole family together again, rotting happily ever after!" Victor let out a cry of inarticulate rage, but had no words. Behind the altar, Henry had finally risen, having been released from the rats himself, and he gazed down at Helene's body like it hurt to look.

"I'm so sorry I can't be here to see the reunion," Barkis continued with a little bow and flourish. "But I'm afraid I have an appointment with the great beyond." He spread his arms and raised his chin to the sky, as if in exultation, before looking back. ""It's such a beautiful sight," he said, eyes lingering on Helene's body. "All I ever wanted, really. I hope you'll tell her she made an old man very… happy." And he turned away, then, to the altar where the big doglike rat was sitting with half-closed, satisfied eyes.

Victor tried again to rise from the ground, and finally sat back. There was no point fighting anymore. In a moment Helene would rise again, blue as a nightmare, to ask why he couldn't protect her, and he would have no answer to give.

"I'll miss you, old friend," Barkis was saying to the rat, who seemed to vibrate in response. "And I won't forget what I promised you." He cast the men a malevolent smile with his one good eye. "Chew their bones." Henry immediately stiffened where he stood. Victor felt too numb to care. The rats in the shadows began building upon themselves immediately, looking eager to jump into the fray. "But leave the girl be. I'm afraid I've always been a fool for a beautiful death." He swung around with his hands in the air. "What a wonderful night," he intoned to the sky, as the rats pressed eagerly against the edges of the light, "to finally be free."

Victor wasn't sure what he was expecting, whether a crack of thunder or a split in the earthen sky, but nothing seemed at first to happen. Barkis stood grandly as if ready to ascend, but still stayed firmly upon the ground, looking at first almost peaceful but quickly screwing up into a scowl. There was silence for a moment, tempered by the breathing mass of rats, and then two small words:

"You won't."

All eyes, human and rodent, snapped to the altar, behind which Alphonse still stood. He looked skinnier and younger than usual in his ragged robes, but kept bold, scowling eye contact with Barkis. The larger man drew close to him and towered menacingly, while Henry shrunk and stepped away from the both of them.

"What did you say?" said the madman, clearly daring him to repeat it.

Alphonse did. "You won't," he said, and visibly braced himself. "You won't move on anywhere tonight."

The rats were hissing, spitting, like air escaping from the earth. All Victor could see of Barkis's face was the side with the skeletal grin. "Oh?" he whispered. "And why would you say a thing like that?" Rarely had so much palpable poison ever been heard in a human voice.

Alphonse faltered for a second at the threatening weight of the words, but didn't fall back. "B-because you've been wrong," he said, "if you thought you'd get there by – by finishing your business or whatnot. It's easy. Finishing business is too easy."

"Idiot!" Barkis spat, snatching the deacon's robes and pulling him close. The young man looked horrified. "You don't know what easy is! I have waited seventeen years for this night -"

"And not changed a bit, I think," Alphonse said weakly, standing on tiptoes to stay on the ground. "Still thinkin' about revenge, and murder. Nobody gets anywhere with that kind of thing weighing them down, not in life or death, but the dead get it branded on 'em. Changing's the hardest thing you can do anymore once you're down here, and you don't get to move on till you learn how."

"Preposterous," Barkis snarled.

"It's true," said Alphonse. "I'm a man of God. And it's my job to guide the flock." And, hesitantly, he reached out a hand toward the dead man.

Barkis's face curled into a vicious grimace as he lifted the young deacon clear off his feet and threw him bodily away. He landed next to Henry, who tried to help him up. "And if you're such a noble man of God," the madman spat, "why has He left you here to rot with the rest of us?" Alphonse looked stricken. "You've been abandoned by God as much as any of us have," he continued. "But I don't need any god's help. I'll make my own paradise if I have to." His hair, once carefully coiffed, had fallen stringy and thin, smeared indelicately across his blue scalp, and the side of his face that Victor had hit was beginning to sag away from the bone, from the eye socket. He looked as though he were melting.

"I think I was wrong," he continued, whipping around to Victor again, still bound to the ground. "I think maybe what I really needed was to see the Van Dort boy reduced to a pile of bones and cloth." The rats were chittering excitedly. "What do you say to that, boys?" The swell of noise grew, and the rats already on his legs and shoulders dug in their claws in excitement. The horde grew up like a wave above him and he closed his eyes to prepare for the crash –

_"Stop."_

Everything did. The voice was broken and scratching, but still strong and loud enough to draw Barkis's attention. Victor opened his eyes, but couldn't turn to see. Helene had woken, then. _Don't look,_ he found himself praying of her as he heard her rising from the ground, shakily. _If nothing else, please, just don't watch._

Barkis, though, wasn't moving. His eyes seemed locked on her form, turning from furious to a strange kind of frightened. "How?" he gasped.

"Leave him alone," Helene said, and her voice sounded like death's rattle. She stepped up next to her father slowly, with still-glistening dark blood streaked down her entire front, from collarbone to hem, her hair collapsing strand-by-strand from its graceful knot, clutching in her hand the sword that Barkis had disposed of on top of her. It was a tragedy, Victor thought for a second, that this was the bodily legacy she would have to carry for eternity underground – but he realized, then, that beneath the blood, her skin was still as pale as snow. She sucked breath in greedily with a very wet sound and then coughed, red spattering the ground and trickling from the corners of her mouth. She was still alive.

"Impossible," Barkis gasped, gripping his bloodstained dagger so tightly his blue knuckles were turning white.

"You're a failure," Helene said as she looked up with red-rimmed eyes. "You're a sad and stupid man who's failed in every endeavor he's ever tried." Barkis's half-melting face seemed to droop further with pure fury. "You couldn't kill my mother," she said, and drew herself up to her full height, "you couldn't kill my father," she stepped forward, bearing the sword, "and you can't kill me." And she drew the sword's tip up to his chin.

For just a second, no one at all moved. Then Barkis spat at her, "Watch me!" and slashed his dagger quickly again across her throat. Fresh spurts of blood burst forth and she stumbled forward to her knees, dropping the blade.

"Helene!" Victor cried out as she collapsed onto her side.

Barkis sneered and stepped backward. "I have no more patience for games!" he said, pointing at Victor with a bony white finger. "Tear him apart! I want to hear his bones snap – yaagh!" Suddenly he stumbled as the sword cut into his ankles. Helene was moving again, crawling back to her feet and looking more infernal even than before, jabbing out blindly with the sword. Barkis stepped backward and then tripped, falling and then crawling away as she advanced on him, bloodied eyes full of fury.

"You," she croaked again, slashing at him inexpertly with the blade, "can't – kill – me!" And Barkis backed himself up against a tree, faced with his own sword against his breastbone. They stood still against one another for a moment, and blood dripped steadily down Helene's wrist to land upon the dead leaves. _Pak. Pak. Pak._

"And you," Barkis said finally, "can't kill me either."

The pressure of silence was deafening. Helene's eyes narrowed and then she cast a look back over her shoulder – to Victor still held hostage on the ground, to Henry, to Alphonse. Slowly a little smile tugged at her lips.

"No, I can't hurt you," she said carefully, drawing away and lowering the sword. "But _they _can hurt you," she continued, and her eyes lit on Benjamin, still curled on top of the altar, "or I can hurt them." From the edge of the trees came trotting the fat brown tomcat which had accompanied her to the ceremony, and it wrapped itself around her ankles, staring out with impassive yellow eyes. The rats recoiled at the sight of it. Her fingers curled around the blade of her sword and something lit up in her eyes the likes of which Victor had never seen before – a frightening look of pure malevolence. "What do you say to those terms?"

For a minute not a single rat moved in the clearing. Then, as one, they turned their gazes to Barkis, leaning against the tree. He gazed back, wide-eyed. "Now there, boys," he said in a low voice as the horde began to creep in. "You wouldn't. After all these years…"

The rats all inched forward.

"Just kill her," Barkis urged. "Turn on her. She can't kill anyone if she hasn't got arms…!" But something in the air of the animals had become more nervous, and none of them seemed inclined to look back at Helene. All eyes were on the half-rotted man on the ground.

Helene said, "Do it."

Benjamin made an ear piercing squeal and the colony rolled forward en masse. Victor found himself released without reserve, left kneeling on the ground with clothes tattered but all extremities still intact. "No!" Barkis screamed over the cacophony. "Benjamin! You can't! The girl! _Get the girl!" _But his cries, slowly, were drowned out as the rushing tide of fur enveloped him and began to disperse out into the forest, to disappear into the dark. The moving horde sounded like an earthquake between the trees, and seemed to rumble long after the last of its many terrified voices had been silenced.

In the quiet that was left over, the air seemed too heavy even to speak in. Victor stood up slowly, entranced by the vision before him of tattered garlands and shattered pews, the aftermath of even worse an affair than his own first wedding. From the ground were rising tens of unsteady blue bodies – the rats' captives from the circus, the strongman who had held Victor captive, one of the men who had pulled Henry back into the tent, a dozen more. They stood slowly and blinked, marveling at their hands and at each other. And past everything else, before the largest tree in the clearing, Helene still stood, head tilting forward. The sword fell limply from her hand. Victor ran forward to catch her as she started to sway, and helped lower her slowly to the ground as Henry and Alphonse jogged up behind.

"Hello, Dad," she said weakly as he brushed the hair out of her eyes.

"Hello," he said back.

"I can't believe it," Henry said, helping to support her back so that she didn't have to lie down. He looked like he might cry. "How are you alive?"

"Special gift," she grunted, and shifted on the ground. Her voice was still choked, but less so now than before. She closed her eyes exhaustedly. The brown tomcat curled up delicately by her side and purred. "I feel horrible," she said after a minute. Her whole body was trembling so violently it seemed she might fall apart at the seams. "I d-didn't think there was such a thing as - as this much pain." Tears were welling in the corners of her eyes.

"You've lost a lot of blood," the deacon said nervously, looking back at the ground where she had fallen. There was a vast, gushy-looking black stain in the soil. "You're sure you're not going to, erm, expire now?"

"Yes," she said, trying to sit up and failing. She fell back with a strangled moan.

"Is she alright?" The strongman in his tattered leopardskin rumbled up to inspect the commotion with sad yellow eyes. "'S a lot of blood."

"Can you carry her?" Victor asked.

"I'm not an invalid," Helene groused.

"Sure can," the big man said, and scooped her up in one move, like a baby. She kicked her feet weakly and then gave up.

"We should go," Alphonse said nervously, looking around. The circus seemed to be creaking around them, as if angry that it had lost its inhabitants. "This place…"

The strongman had already began marching toward the arch with Helene in his arms. The rest of the circusfolk were following uncertainly behind, holding one another, looking upset and confused. The ringmaster in his crumpled top hat and torn red tailcoat turned back to look at the sight of the decrepit tents and the vast skeletal Ferris wheel, and doffed his hat sadly.

"I don't understand how it all went so wrong," Victor heard him say to the sky at large. "It was going to be spectacular."

Up ahead, Helene was beginning to put up a fuss again. "Let me down," she insisted, and the strongman finally conceded to allow her to her feet. She limped forward unsteadily with a hand on her stomach, and the other lost in the folds of her voluminous stained skirt. She stepped up next to the ringmaster and gently touched him, pulling out the little brass box she'd brought with her to the ceremony. She opened it and flicked a little flame into existence at the top, at which the ringmaster started. She let the fire die and then dropped the box into his blue hand. Victor came up behind her to place a protective hand on her shoulder.

"Let it go," she said, sounding like she'd been eating gravel and stooped like an old woman. "You can build something again, but this place can't ever be what you hoped now."

The ringmaster looked doubtful, but slowly his disbelief slid away into an expression of understanding. Sadly, he picked up a lone skeletal leaf from the forest floor and held it up to the dull light of the sky. He set the fire of the little brass box up to its edge and it crackled immediately into flame.

They all stepped back as the little leaf fell to the ground and there bloomed brighter than before. The fire spread along the dry pine needles and seeds, and touched the edges of the tents and pews and the shattered garlands hanging in the trees. The ghostly lanterns which had once lit the clearing were muted by the increasing light of the fire, and soon even the giant Ferris wheel was creaking with the inferno licking its bones. Helene began to fall again, and this time Victor was there to hold her up as every soul present stood silently beneath the archway to watch the deathly carnival go up in flames.

* * *

><p><strong>I have never written a chapter with the word "blood" used over and over again so many times. It was awesome. (Seriously though I did a word count, it's like 25.) <strong>

**Flaming Trails bullied me into burning down the circus at the end in order to give the lighter some thematic significance in the story rather than just being a thing that pops up now and again ("Good use of the law of conservation of detail, Cori!" "Thanks, Cori!"), so you can all redirect your questions to her about how the entire Land of the Dead doesn't go up in flames in about half an hour, I'm too close to the end to be concerned with gaping plot holes, tralala**


	16. Epilogue: All Saints' Day

**Some of you may have noticed my recent name change. This comes with the end of my time writing this series of stories, as after today my recognizability in this section stops mattering. It has been a fun time, though. CORIOREO IS DEAD. LONG LIVE WHIGGITY. **

16

This was the last thing: After the night Upstairs had come to a close and All Hallows' Eve could shut its eyes for another year, after the circusfolk had been pulled into pubs and warm doorways with the promise of a good drink and a sympathetic ear, after the crowds had dispersed and even friends were gone to make their own way through the new day; after all of that, they stayed. Helene was looking reasonably well, all things considered, though still rather red-crusted. She and her father sat side-by-side on the bench at Daughters Leap, spellbook at hand, not saying much, not feeling like there was much they needed to say that they hadn't already.

Victor hadn't been sure she would be able to climb the stairs to the lookout, but it had been her idea, and she'd taken each step determinedly, though not without struggle. The bleeding had stopped a while ago, and her voice was starting to recover from its gravelly overtones. He still worried about her, but had the feeling she actually was going to be alright, like she said. Why she'd wanted to be here at the end of the night, he felt like he knew. Somewhere in the Land of the Living, the sun was coming up. One could tell, usually, by the light beneath the Earth, which grew ever so much brighter at the advent of day without breaking the horizon, like a Northern winter sun, and father and daughter together sat still in its cool glow as the library bells struck seven.

"Happy birthday to me," she said at the tolls' end, and as absurd as it was, Victor laughed a little, and Helene did the same, wincing all the way.

"I hope your seventeenth is better," he said, placing a hand on her back as she started to cough, still chuckling a little.

"Could it be?" Helene said, sitting up with a hand on her ribs. She turned to look at him, quirking a corner of her still-bloodstained mouth. "This one has been fantastic."

"You're very funny."

"I'm not being funny. I really mean it. Even after everything, I'm glad I came." She bit her lip for a second, and then leaned in and encircled her father in a hug. "Thank you," she said. "It's been the best birthday ever." There was a lot he could have said to that, but instead, he chose to return the embrace.

"Maybe," he said with his chin on her head as the thought occurred to him, "we should work together, on making your next one better." She pulled away. Her expression was puzzled, but then it broke into a smile.

"Oh! Well. What kind of daughter would I be if I weren't ever to come around to visit my father?" she asked. "Not at least once a year."

"That's the ticket," he said, and again, they hugged. The spellbook was heavy on his lap. "Are you ready?" he asked after they were done, rubbing her shoulder.

"I think so." She looked out over the Land of the Dead one more time with the muted light of dawn in her eyes. "Even after everything," she repeated, "I'm really glad I came." Victor smiled.

"I'm glad you did," he said.

And together, they opened the book to send her home.

* * *

><p>Agnes Hall had been having a difficult morning, to say the least, and it was still only just new. She normally rose before the sun, but today had been roused even earlier than that by a confounded croaking noise outside of her bedroom window. It would not stop. She tried to ignore it for what seemed like aeons, and finally wrenched her window open to find that the source was an enormous toad sitting on a stone next to the rose bush. It stared at her with flat gold eyes. <em>"Rbbbt,"<em> it said loudly.

"Good Lord," she said, squinting at it in the dark. "Are you that one Helene carries about?" The toad did not answer, but croaked again and tried to leap onto the windowsill. "Absolutely not!" she cried, whisking it off of the brick as soon as it had landed so it went flying into the garden. "I don't care if she lets you into the house, I will not. Go darken someone else's morning." She'd closed the window again right behind it, but several seconds later the toad took up again, and anyway she'd touched it and wouldn't be going back to bed now without washing that hand, so she'd decided it was as good a time to rise as any.

She should have known then that this was not going to be her day. A window in the kitchen had been left open a crack so that the night's rain fell through and wetted the floor, and when she tried to light the stove, half of the matches snapped. On top of being left tired from her early awakening, and just generally getting older every single day, she was very much not in the mood to have any further problems this morning.

Which of course meant that when she knocked on Helene's bedroom door to rouse her before breakfast, the girl was nowhere to be found.

She'd stared at the wide-open window on the wall, and the desk and unmade bed spattered with raindrops; she'd closed her eyes and thought, briefly, of wringing the girl's neck, which was therapeutic; and then she'd closed the bedroom door and went back to the kitchen. When the Van Dorts asked her at breakfast where their granddaughter was, Agnes told them she felt unwell and would see them later in the afternoon.

It wasn't that she wasn't worried. She was. There was a bit of a history of overnight disappearances in the Van Dort family, and the last time it had happened, the person involved was next seen dead. Unlike the last time, however, Agnes had a strong intuitive feeling that this incident would resolve itself with her consternation, rather than grief, and she was proven right shortly after breakfast while she stood moving flour bags in the pantry. She paused when she heard a slight creak, and peeked out to see Helene furtively closing the outside kitchen door behind her. She had a cloak over her head, was tracking mud across the floor, and looked overall like a wet cat. She didn't notice Agnes when she stepped out of the pantry, so the housekeeper relished the opportunity to square her stance, cross her arms, and suddenly bark, "Young lady, you are in dire trouble."

Helene froze immediately like a criminal, her back exposed, and after a second her shoulders dropped in defeat. She muttered what sounded like an oath under her breath, but Agnes couldn't hear which one it was, so she couldn't punish her for it. "I thought you were upstairs," she moaned, face still concealed by the cloak.

"Did you think I wouldn't notice you were gone?" Agnes hissed, rounding on the girl. She'd already enjoyed her brief second of just being glad Helene was home; now she could indulge her anger. "Where on Earth were you? How long were you -?" She tugged sharply at the cloak and pulled it off of her shoulders. Helene cried out and tried to snatch it back, but Agnes had already seen all. She gasped aloud and stepped away. From head to toe, the girl was covered in blood.

"Oh my Lord," she nearly screeched, close to forgetting that the Van Dorts might hear.

"Shh, shh!" Helene said, wrapping the cloak around her shoulders again and glancing about. "Mrs. Hall, I'm fine! I'm fine." Her voice sounded growly and low. "Please," she whispered, "don't scream."

"Oh, Lord," the housekeeper said again, leaning on the kitchen counter. "Oh-h, child…" She was not a woman easily shaken by the sight of blood, but the girl had a gash across her throat, of all things. It looked deep. How she seemed unharmed, she couldn't fathom.

"I almost made it, too," Helene groused, wrapping the wet cloak around her shoulders with consternation. "You can't imagine how hard it was to make it back home from the cemetery without being seen in the square."

"The cemetery?" Agnes asked, incredulously.

"Yes, I went to visit my father." Agnes had a thousand and one things to say to that, but caught her composure and decided to keep all of them to herself. "We had a lovely night." To that, she had nothing to say at all. "He wasn't so bad as you led me to believe, you know. I'm sorry I didn't get to know him before."

For a minute they were both quiet. "Helene," Agnes said with great control, using the girl's first name in a way she rarely did. "I am truly not sure what you expect me to say to that."

Helene opened the cloak again and looked down her front. "Will you say you'll sneak me upstairs and help me change clothes?" she suggested.

"Oh, Lord…" Agnes said as she finally got a look at the gown the girl was wearing. Where she would have gotten such a thing, she couldn't fathom. "What in heaven and hell have you gotten up to? Let alone you come home covered in blood, you look like you were dressed by a horde of prostitutes!"

"They meant well," she said, and once again, Agnes felt she might simply fall over from incredulity.

She said, "I have no words."

"That's alright," Helene said. "I have enough for both of us." And despite the viscera, and the dress that invited disaster, the girl gave the impression of radiating a warmth that hadn't ever been there before.

"I will help you upstairs," Agnes said carefully. "And then you will explain this to me. Every. Ounce. Of it."

She kept her tone dangerous, but Helene seemed delighted at the prospect. "Oh, Mrs. Hall," she said, pressing her hands together, and then suddenly scrunching her shoulders and jumping to grab the housekeeper around the middle and hold her tight. Agnes recoiled from the mess, and the girl pulled away again. "Mrs. Hall, you can't imagine," she said, with blood on her face, with dirt on her hands, with stars in her eyes.

"I've simply had the most wonderful night."

* * *

><p><strong>Helene will go on to have a very exciting and fulfilling life, which I'm not going to write about, but which I can promise includes: A very brief stint trying to pass as a man to join the Navy; dying from being stabbed in the stomach, again; coming to be very best friends with a seventeen-year-old prostitute; serving as a nurse during the Great War; dying of the Spanish flu; marrying a New Yorker and coming into possession of four stepchildren; dying from falling down the stairs; almost dying of a kidney infection; taking a trip in a zeppelin; and eventually dying for good at a very ornery 106, vocally proud of having never used a microwave oven.<strong>

**Now I'm finally done. I have wanted to finish this story for eight years now (oh my god I'm getting old) and now that I have - it feels good! Over the course of this (s)crappy trilogy, my attitudes toward _Corpse Bride_ as a movie have shifted a lot, not necessarily in a positive direction, but being a fan of it changed my life and shaped my teenage years in a very concrete way, and for that reason it will always have a special place in my heart. For now, though, it's definitely time to move on.**

**Whether or not I ever write for CB again, though, I will continue to troll around this section, and I still have works in progress! I'm currently writing a nice pensive little series of short chapters for _Over the Garden Wall,_ which I've been pretty happy with so far, so I hope some people will drop by it to R-and-R. **** I've considered doing a thing for _Gravity Falls,_ and I swear that I'm going to get back to work on my _Redwall_ story eventually too, the hiatus is not forever. Very, very speculatively, I may also someday move over to _Doctor Who _as well, because I have, if I may be perfectly humble, a _completely awesome_ story idea more than worthy of broadcast, but writing it would be a lot of work and I'm not sure I'm enough of a _Who_ fan to see it through, so I'm putting it out here anyway for posterity. Anyway, the point is that I have other stuff coming, and if you care to see what it is, put me on alert.**

**As my final note, I recently made myself a Tumblr account. If you follow me, I will provide you with an on-and-off stream of original, not-awful fanart for various properties as the fancy strikes me, and I promise not to flood your dashboard with two-second gifs or angry rants about the patriarchy, so give it a try!**

**This is a fantastic little community; thanks to so many of you for being there to read while I worked to get where I am now. I hope I'll see some of you guys again!**

**~ Cori**


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